Show: Preventing doc drift in agentic coding workflows

I’ve been using a “deep init” style setup with coding agents — each directory has its own README.md / AGENTS.md describing roles and constraints.

It works well early on.

But as the codebase grows, those docs inevitably drift, while the agent still treats them as ground truth.

That creates a subtle reliability issue: the model is following instructions — they’re just stale.

To experiment with this, I built a small tool called VeriContext.

When documentation references code, it embeds a SHA-256 hash of the exact snippet (inside an HTML comment, so rendered Markdown stays clean). On verification, either the hash matches or it fails (fail-closed, no fuzzy matching).

It can run: • as an agent skill (verify before finishing a task / committing), or • via pre-commit / CI (e.g. npx vericontext verify workspace …)

The goal isn’t better prompting — it’s constraining documentation to stay aligned with code.

I’m curious how others are handling doc / context drift when using Codex or other coding agents.

Would strict fail-closed verification feel too rigid in practice? Has anyone tried AST-aware approaches instead of raw snippet hashing?

github.com

GitHub - amsminn/vericontext: Deterministic, hash-based verification for docs...

Deterministic, hash-based verification for docs that reference code. Fail-closed. Zero fuzzy matching.