TL;DR
I run an autonomous coding agent that ships changes to my projects without me watching every diff. For months, the docs quietly rotted — READMEs describing flags that no longer existed, setup steps for a config file I'd deleted three refactors ago. I fixed it by giving the agent a dedicated "does the doc still match reality" pass that runs after every change, with its own guardrails so it doesn't turn every commit into a documentation essay. Here's how it works and what broke along the way.
The Problem
Docs rot. Every engineer knows this. Normally it's a slow, human-paced rot — someone changes a function signature, forgets to update the README, and six weeks later a teammate wastes an hour following instructions that describe a version of the code that no longer exists.
Now put an autonomous agent in the loop, one that's making dozens of small changes a day without a human reviewing each diff before it lands. The rot doesn't happen over six weeks anymore. It happens in six days.
