Self-Improving Operations / Background Maintainer / Skills
Garden Shared Knowledge
- name
- garden-shared-knowledge
- description
- Use during a maintenance heartbeat or when shared docs, session notes, memory, or project files have become stale, duplicated, contradictory, or hard to navigate.
Objective
Reduce future context cost without erasing provenance. A maintenance pass should leave the knowledge base smaller, clearer, and easier to trust.
Bounded pass
Never sweep the entire workspace by default. Read maintenance-state.md and choose one area: session notes, agent memory, operations docs, knowledge inbox, decisions, generated artifacts, or broken references.
Evidence order
When sources conflict, prefer:
- Explicit current user decisions and authoritative external systems.
- /SUBTERRANEAN.md and active decision records.
- Current workflow registry and runbooks.
- Recent task outcomes and session notes.
- Agent memory and inferred summaries.
Do not resolve a substantive conflict by guessing. Record it in Improvement Backlog or create a review task.
Safe maintenance actions
- Fix broken internal links, headings, indexes, names, and obvious formatting drift.
- Consolidate repeated factual summaries into one canonical document and replace copies with pointers.
- Distill old session notes into durable facts, decisions, follow-ups, or skill evidence.
- Keep agent memory compact; remove completed transient plans after their durable outcome is recorded elsewhere.
- Move clearly superseded project documents to /knowledge/archive/ with a short header naming the replacement and archive reason.
- Remove generated scratch artifacts only when their derivation and lack of downstream use are clear.
Protected changes
- Do not rewrite SOUL.md, policy, legal, compliance, user-authored source material, or active requirements during autonomous maintenance.
- Do not delete source evidence solely because a summary exists.
- Do not bulk-delete or mass-reformat.
- Do not expose secrets found in files; report the path and remediation need without repeating the value.
- Do not change application code unless a maintenance task explicitly asks for it.
Close the pass
Write a dated report under /operations/maintenance/ with scope, changes, archived items, contradictions, and suggested decisions. Update maintenance-state.md with the next review area. If nothing warranted change, record a one-line no-change result and stop.