docs: write the pages in neutral third person

The docs pages carried 36 attributed opinions — "Matt's own answer",
"his position is", quoted replies from the author. A page is a
technical document about a skill, so the substance of each finding
stays and the attribution goes: "the fix is a direct instruction: …",
"the split comes down to session count".

Quotes from *users* stay, anonymous as they already were — those are
evidence about the skill in the wild rather than the author's view.

Records the rule in .agents/writing-docs.md so new pages don't
reintroduce it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Matt Pocock
2026-08-05 16:56:48 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 0986ebaf5d
commit 86b07d15da
18 changed files with 45 additions and 43 deletions
+2 -2
View File
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ The opposite failure exists as well: if your own global instructions forbid an a
**Where should the file live — and should I commit it?**
The skill puts the file where the repo already keeps notes and does not have an opinion beyond that. The community one is fairly settled: ADRs are kept, research files are not. The sharpest version of it, from a Discord thread on exactly this question: "ADRs yes. Everything else archive or delete after done. It otherwise becomes cruft of work and can poison future repo reads if you've drifted away from the spec/research." A research file records what was true on the day it was written, so a stale one is worse than none. Matt's own position is that these artifacts don't really belong in git, and there is no ruling from him on a canonical home — people use Obsidian, a separate knowledge repo, or the issue tracker instead.
The skill puts the file where the repo already keeps notes and does not have an opinion beyond that. The community one is fairly settled: ADRs are kept, research files are not. The sharpest version of it, from a Discord thread on exactly this question: "ADRs yes. Everything else archive or delete after done. It otherwise becomes cruft of work and can poison future repo reads if you've drifted away from the spec/research." A research file records what was true on the day it was written, so a stale one is worse than none. On balance these artifacts don't really belong in git, and there is no canonical home for them — people use Obsidian, a separate knowledge repo, or the issue tracker instead.
**What counts as a "high-trust" primary source, and who decides?**
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ No. Nothing auto-loads a past research file; it is a document sitting in the rep
**Why not just ask the agent to go read the docs?**
You can, and Matt did for a long time — his hesitation before shipping this was "I tend to just say that verbatim." Two things the skill buys over the prompt: it runs in the background so your session keeps its [context](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/context) clean, and the primary-source constraint and the cited-file output come out the same way every time rather than however you happened to phrase it. Against a [harness](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/harness)'s own deep-research mode, the difference is the artifact and the source discipline, not the search. If a two-line prompt gets you what you need on a small question, use the two-line prompt.
You can, and a two-line prompt saying exactly that was the practice this skill replaced. Two things the skill buys over the prompt: it runs in the background so your session keeps its [context](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/context) clean, and the primary-source constraint and the cited-file output come out the same way every time rather than however you happened to phrase it. Against a [harness](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/harness)'s own deep-research mode, the difference is the artifact and the source discipline, not the search. If a two-line prompt gets you what you need on a small question, use the two-line prompt.
**When does it stop reading?**