ChloeVPin Lifecycle: draft
Knowledge Maintenance and Freshness
Purpose and scope
Use this skill to keep skills, evidence, decisions, and taxonomic relationships current over time. It identifies review triggers, freshness windows, deprecation, supersession, and uncertainty. A freshness signal is not proof that knowledge is false; it determines when evidence must be rechecked.
Triggers and prerequisites
Trigger when a review date arrives, a dependency/tool/version changes, a source is deprecated or superseded, a failure contradicts a skill, or a new authoritative source changes the decision boundary. Prerequisites: artifact provenance, lifecycle state, last validation, review window, owner/process, and known dependents.
Decision criteria
Retain, revise, deprecate, or supersede knowledge according to current authoritative evidence, contradiction status, dependent impact, and confidence. Staleness or missing evidence lowers trust; it does not by itself prove the guidance false.
Procedure
- Classify the artifact's temporal behavior: stable, slowly changing, or fast-changing. Choose a review window proportional to risk and change rate.
- Record provenance, publication/version date, last validation date, next review trigger, confidence, and known dependent artifacts.
- Monitor authoritative sources and repository failures for changes, contradictions, advisories, and deprecation signals. Trace repeated claims back to their source.
- When a trigger fires, compare the current artifact with new evidence. Preserve the old decision and record what changed, why, and which dependents may be affected.
- Mark artifacts
experimental,validated,trusted,deprecated, orsupersededaccording to evidence. Do not silently overwrite a deprecated decision. - For deprecation, record effective date or review deadline, replacement/migration guidance when available, and the limits of any sunset signal. Treat dates as signals, not guarantees.
- Re-run relevant validation and differential checks. Lower confidence or restrict use when evidence is stale, contradictory, unavailable, or not independently verifiable.
- Record the maintenance decision, evidence, residual uncertainty, next trigger, and impact on taxonomy and dependents.
Acceptance checklist
- Temporal class and review window are explicit.
- Provenance, confidence, last validation, and next trigger are recorded.
- Authoritative source and failure monitoring are identified.
- Changes preserve prior decisions and dependent-impact analysis.
- Deprecated or superseded artifacts are retained with rationale.
- Replacement or migration guidance is recorded when available.
- Stale, contradictory, or unavailable evidence lowers confidence or blocks trust.
- Maintenance result and next trigger are auditable.
Examples and counterexamples
Good: A tool version changes a documented API; preserve the old skill, record the affected boundary, revalidate dependents, and supersede it only after evidence.
Bad: Update the wording silently because the new version is assumed to be compatible.
Failure modes and recovery
If freshness cannot be determined, label it unknown and keep the artifact below trusted status. If a source disappears, preserve the last evidence and seek an independent replacement. If evidence conflicts, do not average or silently choose; open a contradiction-resolution cycle. If a replacement is not equivalent, record the decision boundary rather than treating it as a drop-in successor.
Validation evidence and provenance
Claims in this skill map to graded findings in docs/research.md:
- Standardized deprecation/sunset signaling (F5): RFC 9745 and RFC 8594 are IETF Standards Track (Strong that the mechanisms exist); RFC 9745 itself notes signals are hints, not guarantees.
- Stale or misread context drives agent failure (F1, F2, Strong): MAST and FAROS failure clustering.
- Generative-AI risk enumeration including stale-data risks (S5, Moderate): NIST AI 600-1.
Source boundary: mirroring HTTP lifecycle semantics in a skill library is an Inferential design choice, not proven staleness prevention.
Confidence: high for the mechanism facts; medium for freshness triggers as sufficient conditions. Freshness: review when RFC status, the research base, or documented agent-context behavior changes.
Disconfirmation: evidence that dated skills mislead no more often than fresh ones, or a better lifecycle model, would supersede this one.
Related skills and conflicts
Related: dependency-security-audit, differential-patch-review, contradiction-resolution, and skill-quality-review. This skill does not authorize silent deletion or override a source owner's deprecation policy.