---
title: "The right fix for doc drift was less tooling, not more"
canonical: https://dxdev.com/blog/2026-05-10_doc-drift-less-tooling/
datePublished: 2026-05-10
---
Reading Osmani's agent harness post triggered an audit instead of a copy. The first pass came back saying three of my repo clones had let their instruction file drift from the master and that I needed a sync mechanism. I told it to go ahead, and it wrote a script that could copy the master file over the others. Then the re-check showed two of those three matched the master exactly and only one had drifted. I said I wasn't clear on this and wanted the best long-term solution, and the answer was not to build sync tooling at all, just to use git. I had the script deleted. In the end I deleted stale `the cockpit/docs`, rejected clone-sync tooling for git plus `ai/sync`, and wired drift detection into `/sync-vault`. The fix was fewer copies of the truth, not more machinery to reconcile them.