My portfolio site has an llms.txt file. It's not for you.

Update (2026-08-04): The baseline-comparison test described in this post has since been retired and rebuilt. It compared llms.txt against a stored copy of its own previous version, which turned out not to catch the kind of drift that actually happened. For a full breakdown of what changed and why. see A baseline is not a fact.

Most documentation tooling checks how a page is written, not what it claims. Vale catches style. codespell catches typos. Lychee catches broken links. None of them check whether the page is still describing something true.

This site has a page that describes its own pipeline: it involves Vale, codespell, Lychee, and Doc Detective, each doing a specific job. I wanted to know if that description would still be accurate next month, not just whether it read well today. So I wrote a test for it.

Sometimes you start one thing, and it tips into another thing, and then another and another.

My first Doc Detective test for this site was like that. And honestly, I am glad. If it had gone smoothly, then I wouldn't have learned nearly as much.

Today I had an object lesson in why I need to supervise my workflow.

I've been making updates around the site, as one does, and realized that Vale wasn't running on my home page or portfolio site. I inquired of Claude Code as to why, and it said that those pages were .tsx files, which Vale ignores.

Mind you, I hadn't asked it to make them .tsx files. It just did it. So I asked if there was any reason they shouldn't be .mdx files. It said there wasn't, so I had it change them to .mdx. That way Vale would review them.

No biggie, right?

Well, today I checked the home page again, and lo and behold, there was a new sidebar on it. Grr.

Being a GitHub repo owner is a trip, I must say.

Like many of us, I have worked in Git for years. YEARS.

I've managed GitHub teams, reviews, branches, fixed merge conflicts, and so many other tasks.

But none of those repos were mine.

Until now.

This site is launched!

I mean, it's been online for a while, but I feel like this blog post is what makes it complete.

You see, this post is what marks the beginning of the workflow testing.

Let me explain.