retro

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

Turn a finished, failed, or disappointing work cycle into portable lessons, anti-patterns, quality gates, and next-cycle vocabulary. Use after a build, QA pass, demo, user complaint, or abandoned attempt when the useful output is what the next pass must learn rather than the code itself.

66installs

Sourcelilmgenius/paperthin

Added on2026-07-07

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add lilmgenius/paperthin retro

SKILL.md Content

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Turn a completed cycle into lessons the next cycle can actually use.

Goal

retro

extracts durable learning from a work cycle without defending the artifact that produced it. A cycle can run, pass tests, and still be the wrong thing. The output is not a changelog or therapy note: it is a local, evidence-backed record of what worked, what misled the build, and what gate the next pass must clear.

Use

retro

when the artifact is done, failed, disappointing, or ambiguous enough that the next agent needs the cycle's lessons more than its momentum.

Workflow

Read the original objective, final artifact, QA evidence, user complaints, and any local planning notes.
Separate working assets from misleading progress: contracts, schemas, tests, services, vocabulary, and examples that earned reuse vs. UI, panels, scaffolds, or abstractions that only looked productive.
Name each failure as an anti-pattern, not a mood.
Convert repeated or high-impact failures into quality gates for the next pass.
Convert vague user direction into architecture vocabulary a fresh agent can use.
Write or refresh local docs for the cycle: a retro for lessons and a plan for next-cycle contracts, gates, and vocabulary.
Verify that a from-scratch agent could avoid the same failure from those docs alone.

Rules

Do not defend the artifact. If it missed the product, say what missed.
Do not write a changelog. File lists and effort summaries are not lessons.
Preserve negative corpus. Failed paths are training data.
Prefer hard gates over advice.
Cite evidence from the cycle: objective, file facts, QA output, screenshots, transcripts, diffs, or user feedback.
If the next agent cannot act on it, it is not a lesson yet.
Keep provenance local; shipped artifacts should not narrate their scars.

Verification

Before finishing:

Every lesson traces to observed cycle evidence.
Every anti-pattern names a concrete failure mode and the gate that catches it.
A fresh agent can tell what to preserve, what to discard, and what to test first without reading the whole old session.