Make the Docs Trustworthy

Core principle. A reader must be able to act on this page without checking it against the system first.

• A second copy of a fact destroys that. The two disagree in the end, and neither one announces itself as the stale one.
• The weight sits in Search before you write. Everything after it is what to do once the search has answered.
• You opened this in the middle of something. This is how to do that work, not a replacement for it. Name what you were doing before you start, and return to it when this is done.

Search before you write

• You MUST look for the fact first. Where it already exists, edit it there.
• A second copy adds no source. It adds a sentence that will disagree with the first one.
• The reader cannot tell which of the two is current. That is the whole cost, and it lands on someone else.
• Where something already prints the fact, write the pointer and stop. A manifest, a config file, a generated block, a command's own help.

Write only what cannot be found by looking