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Getting Started with Truth Management

This is the sequenced plan for standing up truth management from zero. It's designed to get you from "I have no documented operational truth" to "my agents and teammates operate from a live, coherent repository" over the course of about a month.

If you're looking for the philosophical case first, read Why It Matters. If you're already sold, start here.

Before You Begin​

You need three things on hand:

  1. A writing surface. A terminal, an editor, and a Git client. If you don't code, a GitHub web editor plus an AI chat interface is enough to start.
  2. An AI agent with file access. Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent. Something that can read and write markdown files in your repository.
  3. 30 minutes a day. Truth management is not a weekend project. It's a daily practice that compounds.

Day 1: Pick Your Source Controller​

Before writing a single word of documented truth, choose where it will live.

Default recommendation: a GitHub repository. See Source Controller for why source control is the foundation.

  • Individuals: Create a private repo named something like my-truth or <yourname>-os.
  • Organizations: Create a private repo under your org, e.g. <company>-truth. If sensitivity matters, plan for multiple repos per Protect Your Truth.

The commit is the contract. Every future change to your truth goes through this repo.

Day 2 to Day 7: Start Your Company Bible​

Follow the process in Start Your Company Bible to capture what already lives in your head (or in the heads of your team).

Minimum viable first week:

  • A README.md that serves as the truth index
  • A principles/ folder with 3 to 5 core principles written down
  • A people/ folder with a profile for yourself (for individuals) or your 5 most important collaborators (for organizations)
  • A decisions/ folder capturing the last 3 meaningful decisions you made and why

Use Voice Transcriber to accelerate capture. Speak the content, let an agent process the transcript into markdown.

Week 2: Migrate from Siloed Tools​

You almost certainly have operational truth scattered across Notion, Google Docs, Slack, or a CMS. Follow Migrate to Refactorable Systems to pull it into your repo.

Prioritize in this order:

  1. Documents you reference weekly
  2. Onboarding and training materials
  3. Strategic decisions and their reasoning
  4. Everything else (only if it still matters)

Prune as you migrate. Per Make Every File Count, every file has to justify its existence. Migration is the cheapest time to delete.

Week 3: Wire Up Truth as Context​

Your repository exists. Now teach your agents to use it.

Follow Truth as Context:

  • Make sure your README is a complete truth index
  • Set up your agent to load the README at the start of every session
  • Establish the pre-creation context check: before writing any new doc, the agent reads related existing docs
  • Establish the post-creation coherence audit: after writing, check for contradictions and add cross-links

If you have a Personal Agentic OS or equivalent harness, this is where you wire your truth repo into its context layer.

Week 4: Set Up Maintenance​

The repository will decay without active maintenance. Follow Maintain Coherence to install the practice:

  • Write a coherence check skill (freshness, consistency, cross-references, structure)
  • Schedule it weekly via always-on agents or a cron job
  • Review the report each Monday and act on flagged items

Ongoing: Build the Muscle​

After Week 4, truth management becomes a daily practice rather than a project:

  • Every meaningful decision gets a commit explaining the reasoning
  • Every new person in your orbit gets a profile
  • Every strategic shift triggers updates to the affected docs, not a new parallel doc
  • Every contradiction an agent surfaces gets resolved in a commit

Organizational Rollout​

If you're rolling this out for an organization (not just yourself), two additional prerequisites:

  • Empower a truth manager. See Empower Your Truth Manager. Without real authority, the repository becomes bureaucratic theater.
  • Align partners and hires on the practice. See Align Before Committing. Truth management only works if everyone accepts explicit documentation as the norm.

If You Get Stuck​

  • "I don't know what to write down first." Start with your last meeting. Have the agent process the transcript into a decision log and a people update. You now have a first commit.
  • "My agent doesn't have the context I want it to." You haven't wired up Truth as Context yet. The agent can only use what you route into its context window.
  • "The repo keeps going stale." You skipped Week 4. Install the coherence check.
  • "My team won't adopt this." You skipped the organizational prerequisites. The truth manager needs executive authority, not just a calendar invite.

The North Star​

One month in, your agents and teammates should be able to make decisions from shared, written premises rather than from whoever happens to remember the relevant conversation. That's the whole game. Everything else in this section is refinement on top of that foundation.

Further Reading​