Live Truth — the repo outranks everything written about it — refactor-chain · understand/verify

Bundle: refactor-chain (self-diagnosing, self-healing fix-it pipeline). Phase: understand, diagnose, and verify — a standing contract, not a step of its own · Prerequisite: none · Next: whatever phase the verified fact feeds. Adaptivity / conditional: repo-agnostic; always active whenever a system fact is about to be asserted or acted on.

Purpose

Documentation describes the system as someone once believed it was. The repo IS the system as it is right now. Those two drift apart the moment anyone edits anything, so this skill enforces one rule everywhere: never assert a system fact from memory, docs, README, comments, or a recalled note — check the live source first. Docs are stale by default; treat every written claim as a hypothesis with a timestamp, and the live repo, config file, or command output as the only witness that counts. Refactors built on stale claims break real behavior while "matching the docs" perfectly.