Drift & the 3-way model¶

adept has no lockfile. The filesystem itself is the source of truth, and hash comparisons tell adept exactly what changed and in which direction. Two independent comparisons run: the 3-way model between project and library, and a per-harness comparison between canonical and the rendered output on disk.

The 3-way model: project vs. library¶

For every skill, adept compares three content hashes:

Project canonical — <root>/.adeptability/skills/<id>/ (or <root>/skills/<id>/ in a library layout). This is "ours."
Base — <root>/.adeptability/base/<id>/, the last-synced snapshot. This is the common ancestor.
Library canonical — $ADEPT_LIBRARY/skills/<id>/. This is "upstream."

Because skill identity is (id, content-hash), adept can hash each side and reason about divergence without any version numbers or a lockfile.

State	Meaning
`synced`	Neither side changed since base — nothing to do.
`ahead`	Project canonical changed; the library didn't. Your local edit.
`behind`	Library changed; project canonical didn't. Upstream moved.
`diverged`	Both sides changed since base — a real conflict.

This is what lets adept tell "you edited it" apart from "upstream changed it" — see Libraries for how the base snapshot fits in.

Harness drift: canonical vs. rendered output¶

Separately, adept renders each skill in memory and compares the result against what's actually on disk in each enabled harness (.claude/…, .cursor/…, …). Each expected file — including sidecars — classifies as:

State	Meaning
`SYNCED`	On-disk bytes match the expected render.
`DRIFTED`	The file exists but its bytes differ — the harness side was edited.
`MISSING`	The expected file isn't on disk yet.
`CONFLICT`	The path has the wrong shape — a directory, broken symlink, or unreadable target.

Inspecting drift¶

adept status              # one-line drift summary per harness; exits 2 if anything is out of sync
adept diff                # exactly which files are drifted / missing / conflicting
adept diff --harness cursor

adept diff output groups per harness:

HARNESS      SYNCED  DRIFTED  MISSING  CONFLICT
claude-code  3       1        0        0

[claude-code]
  drift    .claude/skills/pr-review/SKILL.md

Resolving harness drift¶

Canonical is right → publish: adept sync (add --force to overwrite drifted harness files, --dry-run to preview).
Harness edit is right → adopt: adept sync-from (interactive), or --all for non-interactive adoption from every harness, --force to overwrite canonical, --dry-run to preview.
Conflict: review with adept diff, then decide which side wins and run the corresponding command with --force.

Enforcing it in git¶

Install a pre-commit hook that blocks commits when there's drift — see the Git drift hook guide. In CI, run adept status and branch on its exit code (2 = drift/dirty).