Tutorial maintenance

Keep a tutorial's promised outcome reproducible while preserving its intended version and teaching path.

Establish the version contract

Read the tutorial, linked code, dependency locks, setup requirements, prior verification notes, and the user's requested target. Decide whether the work is a repair for the existing supported version or an explicitly requested migration. A newer release alone is not a defect. Preserve the old path if it is still supported and within scope.

Inspect each affected command, API, file path, configuration value, expected result, and hardware assumption against the authoritative source for that version. Follow redirects to see whether the destination still answers the reader's question; an HTTP success alone does not establish a useful link. Record unreachable sources as unverified.

Identify material drift

Separate broken steps, unsupported claims, changed defaults, stale screenshots, and harmless cosmetic differences. Trace each proposed correction to a source or observed failure. Follow changes through prerequisites, snippets, expected output, troubleshooting, reset/cleanup, and any companion sample; a renamed flag may invalidate several sections.

Keep simulation and target-device verification separate. Hardware revision changes need exact compatibility and wiring evidence. Preserve credentials and user data while testing; avoid exposing values in excerpts or rerunning destructive setup steps merely to check the prose.

Repair and verify

For an audit, propose the smallest patch without editing. When updates are requested, apply the patch to the authorized files and reuse the project's checks. Prefer a clean environment matching the tutorial to one with hidden cached assets. Re-run the affected reproduction path when feasible and authorized, including a relevant error/recovery step. If execution is unavailable, finish source-backed edits and label the remaining run explicitly.