management/analysis/findings/F-009-doc-attention-does-not-follow-work-mass.md

F-009: Documentation attention and actual work mass point at different components

category: structural-drift confidence: medium

evidence:

• Open issues per component (analysis/data/gitlab_issues.json): axion1337.chat-gitops 35 · management 26 · ThreadNet-Web 9 · threadnet-call 1 · thread-net-git 0 · threadnet-operating 0.
• Commit volume over all refs (analysis/data/git_activity.tsv): axion1337.chat-gitops 269 · ThreadNet-Web 52 · threadnet-operating 21 · threadnet-call 12 own · thread-net-git 11.
• Repository substance (analysis/data/tree_*.txt): thread-net-git holds 4 tracked files (.gitignore, README.md, docker-compose.yml, one file under backup/) and one markdown document; last commit 2026-08-02, 7 days before the reference date. threadnet-operating holds 27 files, 2 documents.
• Against that, vision/threadnet.md:9-11 presents all four ThreadNet repos as equal members of the product line, and roadmap.md:50-62 gives the ThreadNet line six numbered items, five of which concern ThreadNet-Web and none of which concern thread-net-git or threadnet-operating.
• The component carrying half the open work, axion1337.chat-gitops, is named in the vision document not at all and in CLAUDE.md once, parenthetically, as an equation to a display name (CLAUDE.md:6).
• All 14 issues of the newly created M5 — Härtung milestone are in axion1337.chat-gitops.

impact: A reader forming a mental model from vision/ and roadmap.md will weight five components roughly equally and will not learn that one of them holds half the backlog while two are effectively dormant. Session-start reading therefore mis-primes exactly the prioritisation that the roadmap exists to steer. This is a mismatch, not a defect: dormancy may be entirely intended — but the documents do not say so, and README.md:68-70 requires each point to describe "den tatsächlichen Zustand".

root-cause pattern: Documents describe the intended shape, the tracker holds the actual one, and nothing reconciles them. Related to F-001 in mechanism: the tracker is where reality accumulates, the documents are written once.

neckbeard mechanism: AGENTS.md:79 plus scripts/gen_status.py: STATUS.md is a generated overview of open issues, active designs and recent ADRs, explicitly "do not edit by hand", and WORKFLOW.md:128 puts reviewing it for "anything stale or surprising" on the refinement agenda. With ADR-0002's in-repo issues, work mass is countable from the tree, so the imbalance would be visible in a generated artifact rather than inferable only from an API. Gap in neckbeard: gen_status.py covers one repo. This project is six, and neckbeard has no cross-repo status concept — the same missing "components" artifact as in F-008.

confidence note: medium rather than high — the underlying counts are exact, but "attention should follow work mass" is a judgement about intent, and dormant-by-design is a legitimate answer the documents simply do not give.