Living Documentation

Knowledge sharing that stays correct with the least effort. Distilled from Cyrille Martraire, Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design (Addison-Wesley, 2019) - cite the book as the canonical source.

The whole method hangs off one maxim: no mechanism, no trust. A durable fact without something keeping it true is rot-in-waiting, and one stale fact a reader catches destroys the authority of every other fact in the document.

Use when

• Writing or reviewing an AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md, a SKILL.md, an ADR, a README, or a knowledge-base note.
• Deciding whether a thing is even worth documenting.
• A doc keeps drifting from reality, or feels too long to trust.
• Designing how a project's knowledge should be organised.
• Documenting, reverse-engineering, or rescuing a legacy / inherited codebase nobody understands.