Living Docs is a decision log with a gate. It records the engineering decisions a future reader would pay to rediscover, traces each from its rationale to the code, and refuses to let a record exist unindexed, untyped, or silently rewritten. The spine — every piece of knowledge has exactly one home, that home is indexed, and a material decision ships with its record — carries a small set of record types: ADRs, issues, research, a constitution, an optional PRD, and living architecture views.
\nThis skill is stack-agnostic. It governs how decisions are recorded and maintained, never what technology a project uses.
\nThis SKILL.md is a slim stub — a trigger plus a task→topic router. The living-docs CLI\nholds the full, authoritative conventions and templates and discloses them progressively.\nBefore authoring anything, load the topic for your task and operate from it, not from this\nstub:
living-docs skill living-docs --list — discover every topic.living-docs skill living-docs --topic <topic> — load that topic's full rules (+ template).Piped output is minified JSON (machine default); --plain for human text, --json to force\nJSON.
Write ONLY the body below the closing ---. Frontmatter and indexes are CLI-owned: living-docs set / supersede / index.
living-docs skill living-docs --topic spine.living-docs skill living-docs --topic procedure.Write an ADR when a future reader would pay to rediscover why you chose this over the\nalternatives — i.e. the decision is expensive to reverse. Otherwise put the choice in the\nissue that carries the work. When in doubt, it is an issue. A record is earned by\nmateriality, never by the fact that a change touched structure or behavior — do not manufacture\na record per layer.
\ndocs/ structure, the docs index, ADR/issue directories) → living-docs skill living-docs --topic procedure.living-docs migrate for the ordered ADOPT plan (ADR 0037), then living-docs skill living-docs --topic migration and --topic procedure: inventory the decisions, confirm each with the user before recording any ADR, never back-fill by inference alone.architecture.md, kind-less views, hand-maintained table indexes) → run living-docs migrate and execute its RUN/AUTHOR steps in the printed order → living-docs skill living-docs --topic migration.living-docs skill living-docs --topic adr (load --topic procedure first if not already loaded this session). A test-strategy decision (non-default level/technique, bar deviation) is an ADR tags: [testing], not a new record type.living-docs skill living-docs --topic prd (load --topic procedure first). A PRD without who-asked/out-of-scope is just a large issue — keep it an issue.living-docs skill living-docs --topic constitution (load --topic procedure first).living-docs skill living-docs --topic issue-workflow (load --topic procedure first).research-artifacts skill. It owns the OKF research-note format, the source discipline, and the research → decision → issue traceable chain, and links back here for the ADR/issue artifacts. Pairs with the deep-research skill.living-docs skill living-docs --topic architecture-diagrams.living-docs skill living-docs --topic semantic-index.living-docs effective (active records only, supersede chains collapsed; --topic <term> to filter, --full for bodies — ADR 0050), never index.md directly.check advises at 120; research exempt; never trim a load-bearing rationale) → living-docs skill living-docs --topic size-targets.living-docs check; treat a non-zero exit as blocked; treat each advisory (SIZE, LIVENESS stale-proposed, MOVED-SOURCE) as work to schedule. Detail → living-docs skill living-docs --topic check; the maintaining loop → --topic procedure.type, reserved index.md/log.md, bundle-relative links, # References) → living-docs skill living-docs --topic okf-format.living-docs skill living-docs --topic doc-trail.