What Amiss is not

Amiss does not read your prose. A hash can prove that a file changed; it cannot prove that a sentence became false, or that anyone reviewed it. The investigation behind this tool spent a long time on designs that pretended otherwise, and the strongest lesson in the record is that observation, acceptance, review, and trust are different facts, and dressing one up as another rots all of them. So Amiss reports structure: this link resolves or does not, these bytes changed or did not, this paragraph moved or did not. Judgment stays with people.

It is not a link checker in the usual sense. Live-URL checkers query the network and decay with it; Amiss never touches the network and only ever speaks about one repository’s own files at two exact commits. It is not a style linter either: it has no opinion on headings, tone, or wording, and no rule engine to hold one.

It is not a documentation-coupling system with memory. Tools in that family, Fiberplane’s drift, Swimm, and the ledger design this project itself rejected, record what they blessed and react when reality drifts from the record. The rejected design is described in Provenance. The shipped scanner remembers nothing, which removes the migration, merge-conflict, and trust-on-edit failure modes wholesale, at the price of answering a smaller question.

It does not check heading anchors, site routes, code symbols, or other repositories. Each of those is a real check that belongs to a layer holding the right information: the site generator knows its routes, the language server knows its symbols. Amiss lists them as explicit unsupported boundaries in the report instead of guessing, because a guessed pass looks exactly like a real one until it burns you.

And it accepts no configuration that would let a repository weaken its own check. No suppression comments, no severity downgrades, no hooks. The absence is the point.

Against the alternatives

The project record compares the design against every neighboring school, and says where each one wins.

Swimm wins wherever docs are authored inside its platform: its auto-sync genuinely repairs a renamed token without a human. Amiss never edits prose, because the best published comment-updating system reached 16.7% exact match, and a tool that is wrong five times out of six does not get write access. Swimm sees only documents written in its format; Amiss reads the repository as it already is.

Fiberplane’s drift is the closest mechanism, and for a solo developer with twenty hand-placed anchors it is the right amount of tool: an authored @path#Symbol anchor is never a false positive. It checks only what someone annotated, though, and unannotated pages are its silent majority. Amiss starts from zero authoring and reports the whole surface, including the pages nobody thought to anchor.

The AI-rewrite agents win the pitch, because “we update your docs” sounds better than “we tell you what moved”. They lose everything that makes a gate: no coverage guarantee for the page the model never visited, nondeterministic output, and a tired reviewer as the only check on plausible wrong text. The honest relationship is composition: a deterministic finding queue is a good prompt feed for such an agent, and Amiss is deliberately the deterministic half.

Executable-docs systems (doctest and its relatives) prove more than Amiss does about the lines they execute, and nothing about any other line. Regeneration pipelines eliminate drift on derivable content and say nothing about hand prose; user zero’s stale-generator story in The evidence base shows regeneration passing forever on wrong output. Freshness dates are universal and free and gate on the calendar rather than on change. Each of these is a fine layer. None of them answers the question Amiss answers, and Amiss does not answer theirs.