A fresh agent answering "what is a commander, how do I start one" has nothing to answer from, and invents.
The mechanism to fix that already existed and had one user: skills/load.ts compiles an INDEX into every
session — name, when to reach for it, path — and the body costs nothing until the agent opens it. The exact
inverse of an affordance, which sends its body always and its description never.
So no affordance was added, and that is the correction worth recording: an affordance saying "there is a
platform skill" would be a second copy of the index entry, paid for on every turn to say what is already
there. Affordances are facts about the CLIENT; this is reference material.
The platform skill is GENERATED, because a hand-written one rots and we measured it — Spotlight's settings
list drifted in two days, CLAUDE.md claimed 27 permissions against 18 and twenty PM2 entries against
thirteen. A wrong skill is worse than a wrong doc: an agent quotes it with confidence and the user cannot
tell.
Generated: every permission with its kind, label, description, API prefixes, sockets, screens, self-service
routes and read-only-writes; and the keyboard shortcuts. Prose, kept beside the generator so the two cannot
separate: what the platform is, what each KIND means for a user, and where to look next.
It also says what it does NOT cover — installed plugins vary per machine so a generated list would be wrong
on every other server, and request shapes are not in the registry — plus a closing instruction not to guess,
on the grounds that a question the registry cannot answer is one this file cannot either.
docs:check regenerates it into memory and fails if the committed file differs. Verified both directions:
appending one line made it fail naming the file, and regenerating made it pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"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>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5