Living Docs Governance

Long-lived projects often rot at the documentation layer first: the README describes an old pipeline, architecture notes describe a refactor that never shipped, and every new session re-derives context that should already be available.

Living Docs Governance assigns four non-overlapping roles to the project's existing documentation, links those roles from the active agent harness, and defines small update rules that keep the sources useful. The roles matter; the filenames do not.

This is a maintain-phase practice. For one-time exploration of an unfamiliar repository, use codebase-onboarding first.

When to Activate

Activate when any of these are true:

• The repository has grown past a few modules and its docs are drifting from the code.
• Agents or teammates repeatedly rediscover the same structure and decisions.
• Nobody can quickly answer what is healthy, blocked, intentionally removed, or currently authoritative.
• Deleted files or abandoned approaches are recreated because their disposition was not preserved.
• The project needs a durable governance layer without adopting a large documentation platform.

Do not use this for a throwaway script or create a parallel documentation system when the repository already has one.