Living Artifacts

When producing any markdown artifact, every static snapshot of state must be paired with the command, query, or script that regenerates it. The reader must be able to re-derive the value later without guessing where it came from.

What Counts As A Snapshot

Anything likely to drift between writing and reading time:

• File trees, directory listings, project layouts
• Port numbers, hostnames, URLs, file paths
• Version numbers, deployed commits, image tags
• Row counts, table contents, API response bodies
• Lists of users, repos, tables, services, env vars
• "Currently failing tests" or other status snapshots
• Configuration values that have a canonical home elsewhere
• Counts and aggregates

The Pattern