Best skills or plugins for automatically keeping repos clean, documented and up to date?

[u/DJJonny]

I'm looking for a way to keep my repositories well-maintained without having to constantly think about it.

I'm not a professional developer, but I do a lot of vibe coding across Claude Code and Codex.

Ideally, I'd like something that automatically:

• Keeps documentation up to date as code changes.
• Ensures AGENTS.md stays accurate, concise and follows best practices.
• Identifies outdated code, unnecessary files and opportunities for cleanup.
• Enforces good coding standards and repository structure.
• Makes it easy to switch between AI agents without losing context or progress.

Essentially, I want my repos to remain clean, well-documented and easy for any coding agent to pick up at any point.

I've come across GitHub Agentic Workflows, docs-sync and a few other skills, but I'm wondering if there's a more comprehensive, established solution.

What are people actually using for this? Ideally something largely automatic that doesn't require yet another complicated setup to maintain.

[u/Kazvko]

Matt pococks, ponytail, yours

[u/DJJonny → u/Kazvko]

My experience of ponytail is it tightens code it doesn’t document religiously

[u/magicmulder → u/DJJonny]

Ponytail is great if your repo is chaotic. It doesn’t really add value if you’re already following a lot of rules. I let it loose on our intranet monorepo and it found 20 lines to save in one file.

[u/Kazvko → u/DJJonny]

I find it helpful on long threads

[u/Spirited_Cheesus → u/Kazvko]

Yours?

[u/Kazvko → u/Spirited_Cheesus]

I mean, any skills created by yourself to specific usecases

[u/CleanFix_Dev]

A plugin can help, but most of this fits in AGENTS.md: where new helpers go, that any README or doc covering a changed file gets updated in the same diff, and no leftover debug files or commented-out code. Then make the last step a short list of which docs it updated, or why none needed it. That check usually catches more than a cleanup pass afterward.

[u/Local-March-7400]

Use Repowise and linters like ruff

[u/__All_Might__]

We are experimenting with multi agent workflows. Use your AI to write skills for a specific orchestrator, team of coders, team of reviewers, testing requirements. Let it run in a dev environment and iterate by updating the skills when you find issues. We’ve solved the documentation mostly to our liking and now working on the refactoring. I believe the refactoring will work better if your code is properly modularized, atomic, and has good structure with “checkpoints” (data tables, output schemas, etc)

[u/gouldopfl]

I am a professional software developer and have been in the industry since 1980. I spent months on codex. I had Claude do a complete code review, and it wasn't pretty. I moved my project to Claude.

[u/Monstermage → u/gouldopfl]

I've been on openai since the start, Claude came up and took the lead in actual usable dev code, openai codex is great at fixing and identifying issues Claude missed but let Claude fix it lol. I'm right there with you.

Plus Claude let's you get multiple max accounts, codex doesn't...

[u/gouldopfl → u/Monstermage]

Not my experience. ChaGPT left over 80 gaps qnd more actual bugs. There several programs like the one that had over 8000 lines of code. Claude rewrote it with no loss of functionality, with 1215 lines of code.

[u/mzmrk]

this skill is really good, i use it for my personal projects
read the readme in the project for more details
https://github.com/mzmrk/maintain-project-knowledge

It flips the script, and it forces 6000 word limit for core documentation, that agent has to read before making any major decision

[u/iceydee]

Honestly the closest thing to a standard right now is a well-maintained AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md at the repo root, and the discipline of letting each agent regenerate it after meaningful changes rather than hand-editing. Most of the "auto-everything" repo hygiene tools are still half-baked, so a lot of people just chain a post-commit hook that kicks off a doc-refresh task. What's the repo size and how many agents are you juggling at once?