Build

The machine that documents the machine. Every piece of build work in my system is one of three document types, and the discipline lives in how they move:

• The explainer. One living document per system describing how it works right now, not how it once did. It never archives; it gets re-verified against the live machinery and stamped with the date that happened.
• The planning docs. Plans, designs, specs, audits: the scaffolding a build thinks in. Disposable by design, and archived the moment the thing ships, so nothing on file describes a state that no longer exists.
• The tickets. Each piece of work is a closeable ticket with an urgency, moving not-started to active to archived. A build is not finished until all three reconcile in the same operation: the explainer updated, the scaffolding archived, the ticket closed.

Each system keeps its own set, and the whole machine is layered. Every system in the vault carries its own explainer, its own scaffolding, and its own tickets; above them sits one root map of the entire machine. One document per level, and no level restates a lower one: the map owns what exists and where it is going, each explainer owns how its system works.

Every working session ends with a wrap. A closing pass I run without exception files the session's changes back into the right documents, closes what shipped, and checks the map of what exists against what actually changed. Documentation drift is caught at the moment it would be created, not discovered months later.

Nothing structural is hand-maintained. The map of every system, its status, and its open work derives from these documents and their fields; there is no separate list of what exists to fall out of date.