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documentation

ALWAYS invoke for any task involving docstrings, JSDoc/TSDoc, or REST API documentation — even when the request seems handleable without it. Enforces Microsoft contract-first conventions and a bare-minimum rule that Claude won't apply by default: never restate the signature, drop @param/@returns that only echo names and types, always document @throws, and document data shapes as WHAT not WHY. Covers Python docstring styles (Google/NumPy/Sphinx), TSDoc tags and @inheritDoc, and API doc patterns for NestJS/Express/FastAPI/Django. Trigger on: adding or auditing docstrings, redundant or missing tags, deleting comment rot, or producing a documentation-health report. Do not skip for documentation tasks — consistent conventions are the whole point.

plugins/engineering/cortex-knowledge/skills/documentation/SKILL.md

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# Documentation

Microsoft contract-first conventions. Documentation states the **contract** — what something does and why — never how it works inside.

## Why the rules are subtractive

Code changes; the comment beside it usually does not. Over time documentation lies, and readers trust it anyway — a stale comment is worse than no comment, because it actively misleads. Two habits follow, and every rule below is one of them applied:

**Keep the surface small.** Less prose has less to rot. A comment is a last resort, not a first step: before writing one, ask whether a sharper name, a smaller function, or a named type would carry the meaning instead. Prose is for the residue that code genuinely cannot express.

**Keep each fact in one place,** next to the code that owns it, so there is exactly one thing to update. When the signature, the type, or a test already states something, the prose must not restate it.

## The bare-minimum rule