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Audit: Plan phase references

What we check

Documentation describes the current state of the software, not the history of how it was built. README.md, AGENTS.md, ARCHITECTURE.md and the files under docs/ must not refer to the phase numbers of implementation plans: wording like "feature YYY, implemented in phase ZZZ" tells a reader nothing they need, often without even naming the plan the phase belongs to. Either the feature is implemented, in which case the docs describe it plainly, or it is not, in which case they link to the master plan in docs/plans/.

AGENTS.md and ARCHITECTURE.md are in scope for the same reason README.md is: they describe current behaviour to a reader who was not present for the construction, so a ## Phase 6: Bridge Lifecycle heading is as unhelpful there as in docs/. Their shape is a separate audit (llm-doc-structure).

The check greps the top-level README.md, AGENTS.md and ARCHITECTURE.md, and every .md file under docs/, for phase <number> (case-insensitive), skipping:

  • any file under a plans/ directory at any depth -- plan documents legitimately discuss their own phases;
  • per-repository doc_content_excludes prefixes from REPO_OVERRIDES in scripts/audit-check.py -- shakenfist's docs/components/ is an automated import of the other repositories' documentation, so auditing it would double-report findings that must be fixed at their source;
  • fenced code blocks and inline code spans; and
  • lines carrying an explicit <!-- audit-ok: phase-reference --> marker.

The word "phase" is reserved for plan documents. A procedural document describing a live multi-stage process -- a release runbook, say -- should call its stages "steps"; the suppression marker exists for the rare line where "phase " is genuinely not a plan reference.

Repositories with none of those files and no docs/ directory are N/A.

The judgment half of the policy is enforced where the references are written: each repository's pre-push audit file carries the canonical plan-phase-references shared block (see the push-audit audit), which instructs the documentation reviewer to keep plan history out of the docs.

Template

No template -- reword the documentation to describe current behaviour, moving any forward-looking material into a link to the relevant master plan in docs/plans/. Consult the referenced plan to work out what the wording should say instead; the rewording must preserve the information, not delete it.

Projects

Per-project compliance for this criterion is regenerated every morning by the consistency audit: see the compliance page.

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