Management

What your agent collected on day one quietly goes out of date. Conventions get revised, specs get superseded, architectural decisions get reversed, and the documents that record all of it drift the moment they stop being anyone's job. Management is the discipline of catching that drift: the CLAUDE.md that still names last quarter's stack, the decision the team walked back but never wrote down, the spec that says one thing while the code does another.

When what the agent reads matches what is true now, it stops heading down paths the team has already abandoned. Your team stops paying for stale context in rework, and the agent's decisions land right because they rest on the system as it is, not as it was.

Exploratory

Docs exist, but no one owns keeping them current, so they rot.

Enables

A first read on which docs actually go stale fast enough to matter. Watching context rot in real time tells you where freshness is worth paying for and where it never will be.

Deficiencies

Stale artifacts steer the agent wrong, outdated conventions get reapplied, and trust in the docs erodes until people stop reading them.

Cost to maintain

Wasted agent effort on dead ends and rework, paid quietly and continuously.

Expert-led

One engineer stays on top of the key docs and fixes drift whenever they happen to notice it.

Enables

The core artifacts stay reasonably current, and the agent can trust the parts that person watches.

Deficiencies

Only their corner stays fresh while the rest rots, and what changed lives in their head rather than on the record.

Cost to maintain

That person's attention, a background tax that scales with the number of docs.

Documented

A written policy says what gets updated and when, with a clear owner for each area.

Enables

Systematic currency on a schedule the team can see, no longer dependent on one person happening to notice.

Deficiencies

Still manual and reliant on follow-through, so gaps open between a planned update and the change that already shipped.

Cost to maintain

Writing the policy once, then the ongoing work of the updates themselves.

Structural

Docs update themselves as part of the work, and currency is enforced rather than remembered.

Enables

Near-zero manual maintenance, docs that stay in sync with the code automatically, and drift caught as soon as it appears.

Deficiencies

It needs tight integration, mis-tuned rules raise false positives, and an over-strict check can slow the work it guards.

Cost to maintain

Upfront engineering to hook docs into the build and tooling, plus ongoing tuning as the rules meet real changes.

Management rarely stands alone. Where it overlaps a sibling discipline, an investment on one side quietly depends on the other. The Context domain page lays these out in full.

• Management and Collection

  Collection gets an artifact in the door; Management keeps it true. The wider Collection reaches, the more surface Management has to hold current, and gathering aggressively without the upkeep just delivers stale context at scale.

  Fund both and a broad corpus stays trustworthy; fund only the first and you have paid to mislead the agent faster.

• Management and Disclosure

  Management makes sure an artifact is still true; Disclosure makes sure the agent reads it at the right moment. The leanest, best-routed context is still wrong if it points at a doc that went stale months ago.

  Currency without routing buries the truth; routing without currency delivers a falsehood on time.