LLM Best Practices

Vault Maintenance

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AI agents: read this first: llmbestpractices.com/start-here

This is LLM Best Practices (llmbestpractices.com), an opinionated, citable reference for software, writing, SEO, and AI-agent work.

  1. Route, do not crawl. Fetch llmbestpractices.com/llms.txt and open only the pages whose one-line summary matches your task.
  2. Read raw. Append .md to any page URL for markdown. Check status and last_updated in the frontmatter, then read the rules.
  3. Apply as defaults. First-party docs and the project's own conventions win on conflict. Warn before relying on a fast-moving page older than 12 months.
  4. Cite. Link the page by title and URL, e.g. Python, with last_updated for time-sensitive rules. License CC BY 4.0.

Overview

A vault is maintained or it is abandoned. Maintenance is a set of scheduled passes over a fixed list of queries, not a vague intention to tidy up. This page gives the cadences, the gates for each, and the rule that decides how much structure a vault can afford.

Size the architecture to the maintenance budget

Ask how many minutes per week the owner will actually spend, and design to that. A vault needing 90 minutes a week from someone who will give 20 is abandoned within two months.

At a low budget, cut hard and say what was cut: five folders instead of thirteen, three note types instead of nine, the weekly review only, no quarterly audit. Cutting layers is a legitimate evolution move (vault-evolution).

Run the weekly review as a fixed 30-minute checklist

Walk the same queries in the same order.

  1. Inbox to zero. Every capture becomes an atom, a source note, or a deletion.
  2. Orphan sweep. Link it or delete it.
  3. Source backfill. Every unsourced claim gets a source link, or confidence: low and a self-derived flag.
  4. Stale seedlings. Atoms 30 days old and still seedling: promote or delete.
  5. Atomicity candidates. Notes past the length threshold: split or trim.
  6. Promotion pass. Would I defend this in writing? If yes, promote.
  7. Decision check-ins. Any decision past its resolution date gets its outcome and lesson now.

Wire the queries into the review note so the pass is one document walked top to bottom.

Build gates as saved queries

Each rule needs a query that finds its violations; a rule with no query is a preference.

TABLE file.mtime AS "Modified", confidence
FROM "20-Atoms"
WHERE (!sources OR length(sources) = 0) AND type = "atom"
SORT file.mtime ASC

The core set: orphans, unsourced claims, stale seedlings, over-length atoms, open questions, stale verification on decision-relevant claims, unresolved contradictions past their aging threshold, decisions due for review, and sources with zero atoms extracted. Keep them on one dashboard note. Bases can hold the simple property filters; Dataview covers the rest (obsidian-plugins). The same checks exist as auditor rules, so the dashboard and the script agree (vault-audit).

Reserve the monthly review for drift

Hygiene is weekly. The monthly pass asks whether the vault still points at the right thing.

  • Scope drift: is the work still the work the vault was designed for?
  • Domain tags: still mutually exclusive, or should some merge or split?
  • Stale verification: re-verify or downgrade every decision-relevant claim past its threshold.
  • Contradictions: any closer to resolution, or ready to abandon?
  • Source diet: which authors and formats dominate, and what does that skew?
  • Synthesis: what is the vault now close to being able to write?

Run the deterministic auditor first and clear criticals before this review.

Test the vault quarterly, do not just read it

Sample 20 atoms at random and read them: still useful, correct, atomic? A random sample finds decay that no query catches, because the notes that rot are the ones nobody opens. Also run the decision pattern review by class (decision-journals), a restore test of the backup, and the semantic pass if the vault is large enough (semantic-audit).

Track the trend

Log every audit run and review, one line each. The direction matters: orphans down, unsourced atoms up, three decisions overdue for a second week. A rising violation count is the early signal that the weekly review has quietly stopped, and a folder or type that keeps outgrowing its design is the trigger for the moves in vault-evolution.

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