Your AI is only as good as the folder you point it at. Corpus Keeper keeps that folder honest.

Every team wiring an AI assistant into their documents is accruing the same disease: context rot. The old price sheet that still looks current. The plan that was cancelled in a meeting but not in writing. Two docs that disagree about the same fact. The AI cannot tell which one is true, so it picks one - with total confidence. The failure gets blamed on the AI. The cause is the corpus.

Corpus Keeper is a zero-dependency auditor and governance scaffold for any folder of documents that you, your team, or your AI treats as ground truth.

Try it in sixty seconds

git clone https://github.com/forgedculture/corpus-keeper
cd corpus-keeper
python3 corpus_keeper.py audit demo_corpus

FINDING [links] CORPUS_INDEX.md: broken link -> roadmap.md
FINDING [links] welcome.md: broken link -> guides/setup.md
FINDING [ascii] welcome.md: non-ASCII byte at offset 101
FINDING [index] CORPUS_INDEX.md: index entry has no file -> roadmap.md
FINDING [index] unlisted_note.md: file not listed in CORPUS_INDEX.md
FINDING [stale] old_plan.md: line 3 marked stale with no pointer to current truth
info    [stale] unlisted_note.md: line 3 has open marker (TODO)
scanned 6 files: 6 findings, 1 info

You will see 6 findings: two broken links, a non-ASCII character, a phantom index entry, an unindexed file, and a deprecated document with no pointer to its replacement. Then open demo_corpus/pricing_2025.md and demo_corpus/pricing_current.md: both claim to be quotable pricing, and they disagree on every number. That seventh defect is the kind a script cannot catch - see "The semantic layer" below.

What it checks

Mechanical rot, on every run: broken relative links, non-ASCII bytes (optional), index drift (files missing from your index, index entries pointing at nothing), and stale markers (SUPERSEDED, DEPRECATED) with no pointer to current truth.

Exit codes are the contract: 0 clean, 1 findings, 2 error. It drops into a script, cron job, or CI unchanged.

Bring your own folder under management

python3 corpus_keeper.py init /path/to/your/folder
python3 corpus_keeper.py audit /path/to/your/folder

init scaffolds the governance layer: GOVERNANCE.md (the rules), CORPUS_INDEX.md (the map), a numbered decision-record template, and an append-only decisions log. Existing files are never overwritten.

The rules in one breath: one current truth at a time, decisions get records, logs are append-only, the index is the map, audit after every edit.

The semantic layer

The auditor catches rot of form. Rot of meaning - contradictions between documents, a stale doc that still looks current, a change nobody recorded a decision for - needs a reader. The Corpus Keeper kit wires your AI assistant to do that pass: a Claude skill, a ChatGPT Custom GPT setup, and an AGENTS.md for Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Copilot, plus governance templates and support.

The kit, and the methodology behind it, live at forgedculture.com.

Requirements and license

Python 3.8+, standard library only. Apache 2.0 (see LICENSE). Configuration via .corpuskeeper.json (written by init): index filename, ASCII policy, exclude patterns, document extensions.

Maintainers: run ./check.sh before committing; CI runs the same script.