Auditing a context file you already have

For a file that already exists and has grown. Half an hour, by hand, one pass. The reasoning behind it is in What earns its place in a context file; this is the procedure.

Do it by reading. An automated pass over this was tried and it classified the single most valuable passage in the corpus as generic, because the thing being judged is not detectable by shape.

Before starting

Count the words. You will want the number afterwards, and it is the only measurement in this that is reliable.

Have the file open beside the project it describes. Several judgements below depend on what is actually in the repository, and recalling it is not the same as looking.

The pass

Take each passage — a section, or a bullet, whichever is the unit that could be deleted on its own. Ask three questions in order and stop at the first no.

1. Would a competent model already know this?

If no, keep it. This is the clearest case and the rarest: an external system’s behaviour, a commercial constraint, a decision and its reason, something that was tried and rejected. Nothing else in the file matters as much.

If yes, continue — knowing is not sufficient grounds for deletion.

2. Would it have done this anyway?

If no, keep it. The agent knows what the operation is and would still have performed it; the passage is buying the pause, the preference, the refusal. Most of a good working agreement lives here.

If yes, it is waste. Delete it, however well written — and it will be well written, because this is the material that flows easiest.

3. Is it here more than once?

Across the whole set rather than within one file. Duplication passes both tests at every individual site and is waste in aggregate. Replace the copies with a pointer to the one place it belongs, rather than deleting them, because the passage does belong somewhere.

The grammatical tell

Faster than the three questions and agrees with them nearly always:

A passage that says here is how X works is usually waste. A passage that says here you do X usually is not.

Files drift toward the first because explaining feels like thoroughness and because it is easier to write. When a section starts reading like a tutorial, it has stopped being context and become documentation of a subject the reader already knows.

What to do with the result

Say that general practice is deliberately absent. One line, near the top. Without it a reader cannot tell a trimmed file from a careless one, and the next person to edit it will fill the gaps back in.

Do not delete the section headings you emptied if the heading itself carries a commitment. Accessibility as a heading with two lines under it says this project has a position; the same heading removed says nothing.

Record the before and after. It is the only number in this worth keeping, and it is what tells you next time whether the file is drifting again.

What this does not do

It does not tell you whether the file helps. It tells you which parts of it cannot be helping — which is a smaller claim and the only one available without running a controlled comparison.

And it is a judgement throughout. Two people will disagree on individual passages, particularly at question two, where would it have done this anyway is a prediction about a system neither of them can inspect. Disagreement there is the process working; the passages nobody disagrees about are not the expensive ones.