docs:check — the documentation's checkable claims, against the code

"Update the docs before a deploy" is a step that gets skipped at two in the morning, and its absence is
invisible. Every piece of drift found today was mechanical — a count, a route name, a process list — so it is
checkable, and a check that exits non-zero cannot be quietly not done.

It found two things on its first run, both wrong for over a week:

  platform/CLAUDE.md    "27 entries as of 2026-08-13"    the registry holds 18
  officer-dev/CLAUDE.md "Officer is twenty PM2 entries"  there are 13

The second was worse than a wrong number. It listed eleven processes that do not run here — vault, slskd,
headscale, transmission, invoiceshelf, wallet, photos, jellyfin, gitea, music, vnc — while omitting six that
do, and named two mybiblepal entries as sharing the daemon when nothing does. Accurate on 2026-08-07, and
nobody re-derives a list of processes while editing the sentence around it. Both are corrected, with what
they used to claim recorded, because the interesting part is how a maintained list decays rather than that it
did.

Three checks: the permission registry count, the PM2 entry count, and every settings route Spotlight offers
resolving to a section some screen declares. That last one is the class the counts cannot catch — a name, not
a number — and it is the drift that shipped a dead link to /settings/users.

THE RULE FOR ADDING ONE, written into the file: a check compares a documented claim against a value DERIVED
AT RUN TIME, never against a second hard-coded copy. A check with the answer written into it is one more
place to drift, and it drifts in the same edit that misses the doc.

What it deliberately cannot do is read prose and judge it. It looks only at claims with a machine-checkable
counterpart — a small fraction of the documentation, and the fraction that rots fastest.

The settings check parses source rather than importing it, and says why: those sections are object literals
inside components, so importing them drags React and a DOM into a CLI.

`skipped:` lines are printed rather than swallowed — a machine without pm2 cannot check that count, and
saying so beats reporting a pass it did not perform.

Recorded as required before tagging in CLAUDE.md, and in prompts/deploy-commander.md as explicitly NOT the
rollout agent's job: it executes a plan, and a prose edit between two hosts is not that.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

CLAUDE.md

@@ -194,7 +194,7 @@ ahead of everything, and it re-verifies the token itself so it covers routes tha
 - `permissions/registry.ts` — the single enumeration of what the platform can do, in five kinds:
   `core` (every account, not deniable), `app` (**the grantable surface**), `confined` (grantable, but
   only to an account that has a Linux user), `execution` and `admin` (owner only, and `execution` is
-  never grantable at any level). 27 entries as of 2026-08-13.
+  never grantable at any level). **18 entries as of 2026-08-22** — verified by `bun run docs:check`, which fails if this number drifts again: 5 core, 3 app, 3 confined, 3 execution, 4 admin. It said 27 for nine days.
 - `permissions/authorize.ts` — resolves "may this account do this". Owner short-circuits first; every
   other answer is role grants plus core, with `execution`/`admin` stripped even if a row grants them,
   and `confined` stripped for an account with no `osUser`.
@@ -224,9 +224,20 @@ bunx tsgo        # typecheck (not tsc)
 bun test         # tests
 bun format       # prettier over every dirty file — see the note below before running it
 bun db:push      # apply the schema to Postgres
+bun docs:check   # do the docs still match the code? REQUIRED before tagging a release
 bun setup        # runs scripts/install.sh — blank machine to running platform
 ```
 
+**`bun docs:check` before every release, and leave it green.** It compares documented claims against values
+derived at run time — the permission count, the PM2 entry count, every settings route Spotlight offers — and
+exits non-zero on drift. A check must never compare a doc against a second hard-coded copy; that is one more
+place to drift, and it drifts in the same edit that misses the doc.
+
+It is narrow on purpose. It cannot read prose and judge it, only claims with a machine-checkable
+counterpart — which is a small part of the documentation and the part that rots fastest, because a number is
+exactly what nobody re-derives while editing the sentence around it. Both claims it found on the day it was
+written had been wrong for over a week.
+
 `scripts/install.sh` is only an orchestrator — it runs the two halves in order and does nothing itself:
 `setup/machine-setup/machine-setup.sh` (28 sections: packages, tailnet, runtimes, docker, shell) then
 `setup/officer-setup.sh` (11: pre-flight, layout, repository, dependencies, database, environment, secrets,