brianbolze drift-sweep — catch drift after an engine change
Run after editing the engine (a contract, a script, a doc) to catch drift before it ships: deterministic checks first (cheap, every time), then a quick doc-staleness pass over only what changed. It proposes fixes — never auto-applies them. Keep the whole thing bounded and cheap; a tiny change needs only the gate.
1. Run the gate — deterministic, the cheap pass
From the repo root, run the gate block in MAINTAINING.md (the "run the gate"
section). Each non-zero exit is drift — note which check failed and why. The command list lives in
MAINTAINING.md, not here, so the two can't fork. A visualcheck/clock-skew failure on a company you didn't
touch is pre-existing, not your change — say so, don't fix it.
2. Doc-staleness pass — the LLM part, bounded by the diff
Scope: default to the working-tree diff (git status + git diff; fall back to the last commit if the
tree is clean). Sweep only docs touched by — or downstream of — the change. A full sweep (every contract +
root doc) only when asked.
- Small change (a few files): read them inline, no sub-agents.
- Broad change: fan out a few Sonnet sub-agents (this is mechanical reading — use the cheap model), one per doc area (contracts / skills / tools / _design).
Look for drift only — a short, generic list (don't enumerate every doc; the method shouldn't need upkeep):
- a pointer that moved — a path, filename, function, or
file:linethat no longer exists or now points wrong; - a broken cross-doc link, or a doc that restates another's rule and now contradicts it;
- a baked count / inventory ("N tools", example lists) that no longer matches reality;
- for each contract the diff touched, walk its row in
MAINTAINING.mdand confirm the listed downstreams actually moved.
3. Report — propose, don't write
One tight digest:
- Clean — what passed (a wall of green is one line).
- Drifted — each finding as
file:line → what's stale → proposed fix. - Needs a human call — anything ambiguous (a judgment, a migrate-vs-grandfather decision).
Apply fixes only if the user says go. This skill spends nothing but Claude reasoning — no captures, no credits.