> Auditing a context file you already have — from The Handover, the-handover.org/docs/auditing-a-context-file
> Authors: Leon Mallett (captivated.online) with Claude Code · Last confirmed working: 2026-09-16 on claude-opus-5
> © Captivated Ltd — free to use in your own work, not to redistribute as a collection. the-handover.org/licence

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.