State each value in one document and link to it

How to do it

Pick the home by topic, such as security limits in the security guide. Elsewhere, write "within the session limit" with a link, never a second number. When you change a value, search all docs for the old number and the topic words first. Two documents that state different values for the same thing are a bug, because readers and agents apply whichever they find first. This follows keep each piece of knowledge in one place, applied to prose.

Examples

Shell example

# Each key topic should state its number in one file only
for topic in "idle timeout" "certificate.*days" "rotate.*days" "retries"; do
  echo "$topic: $(grep -rliE "$topic" docs/ | wc -l) files"
done

How to check

For each value in a list of key limits, a search of the docs finds one stated number. Every other mention is a link to that document.

Measured

On a reference site, a review of 17 guides written in parallel found 28 values or practices stated differently in two or more places.

Related rules

• WEB-17 Write each page once for every format in Website
• AGT-74 Use one name for each thing in every agent file in Agents as users
• DOC-16 Point the instructions file at the docs instead of copying them in Documentation
• ARC-41 Keep each piece of knowledge in one place in Clean code and architecture
• ANA-5 Define each metric once in Product analytics and experiments