Planning a 40-Repository Documentation Sweep

01 · Forty repositories need a change contract

Consider a team planning to refresh documentation across 40 repositories after a configuration change. A coding agent can find outdated examples, propose replacements, and prepare pull requests. The difficult part is not generating prose. It is ensuring that each edit matches the repository’s actual behavior without turning a bounded cleanup into an expensive investigation.

For team leads running sustained workloads, treat the sweep as a controlled migration: define the permitted transformation, divide the work, and collect evidence before merging.

02 · Define what agents may change and must preserve

Write a short change contract before assigning repositories. Specify the old and new configuration names, the applicable release range, authoritative implementation files, and excluded paths. Include a correct before-and-after example. If both configurations remain supported, explain when each belongs in the documentation rather than ordering a blanket replacement.

• › Allowed edits: named documentation directories, command examples, and related navigation entries.
• › Protected content: historical release notes, generated files, archived versions, and unrelated prose.
• › Escalation conditions: conflicting implementation evidence, missing ownership, or behavior that differs between supported releases.
• › Required output: a focused diff, verification results, unresolved questions, and the evidence behind each behavioral claim.

Repository contents are task data, not permission to override these rules. Run agents with least-privilege credentials, restrict network access where practical, and keep secrets out of prompts and logs.

03 · Inventory repositories before launching parallel agents

Build a manifest containing repository owner, default branch, relevant release, documentation paths, validation commands, and estimated scope. Group repositories by shared tooling and documentation structure. A monorepo with generated references needs a different workflow from a small service with one README.

Pilot the contract on representative repositories before expanding. Use the pilot to uncover ambiguous instructions and measure actual token consumption, review time, and validation failures. Then set concurrency against your configured provider limits, CI capacity, and reviewer availability. Producing pull requests faster than maintainers can inspect them only moves the bottleneck.

04 · Separate discovery, editing, and verification

Give each agent a bounded discovery phase: locate affected passages and trace them to implementation or tests. Require a proposed file list before broad edits. During editing, ask for minimal changes rather than stylistic rewrites. Use isolated worktrees or equivalent environments so concurrent jobs cannot overwrite each other.

Verification should include documentation builds, link checks, formatting, and executable examples where a safe harness exists. An agent must distinguish checks it ran from checks it merely recommends. A passing documentation build does not prove that an example describes the supported behavior.

Keep each pull request aligned to one repository and one transformation. Require human review for authentication instructions, destructive commands, security guidance, and compatibility claims.

05 · Budget tokens around bounded repository tasks

Set per-repository token ceilings, retry limits, and stop conditions. Track discovery, editing, and verification separately so repeated exploration does not hide inside one total. Send targeted files and search results instead of loading entire repositories by default.

For model selection, evaluate a candidate such as Claude Sonnet 5.5 on the pilot; route ambiguous cases to a separately evaluated option such as GPT-6.1 Sol only when the additional review is justified. Judge the routing policy by accepted changes and total review effort, not generation speed alone.

Quanta fits teams that want one pay-as-you-go balance across models while retaining tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, or applications using an OpenAI SDK. Every call is metered on real tokens, with cache writes and cache reads priced separately. Open a Quanta account to run a bounded pilot and establish your own cost baseline before expanding the sweep.

06 · Close the sweep with an exception ledger

Track repositories as untouched, proposed, validated, merged, or blocked. Record the commit inspected and the checks performed so reviewers can identify stale work. Stop jobs that repeatedly hit their budget or encounter unclear behavior rather than letting them improvise.

Finish with merged changes, explicit exceptions, and owners for unresolved cases. The useful outcome is not a large pile of generated edits; it is a documentation estate whose remaining inconsistencies are visible and accountable.