kb-check-drift — Surface Refresh Candidates

When to use

User wants to know whether the KB is stale without committing to a rewrite. Run this before a query to decide whether to trust the KB, or periodically to spot drift.

Read-only. This skill NEVER modifies .kb/ content, summaries, indexes, or .kb-state.json. If changes are warranted, emit a list of refresh commands for the user to run.

The one exception: when invoked by kb-maintain or with --write-artifact, the skill writes an opt-in .kb/.drift-report.json so the downstream kb-refresh can reuse the diff/grep work. The artifact is ephemeral and recomputable — see references/drift-report-artifact.md.

Input

• --write-artifact (optional) — write .kb/.drift-report.json after computing the report. Implied when invoked by kb-maintain.

Workflow

1. Read state

Open .kb/.kb-state.json. Extract last_linted_sha and last_linted_at.