retro

name

retro

description

Formal end-of-session retrospective gate that runs BEFORE authoring or resyncing the wiki primer. Asks exactly two questions — 'What are you least confident about right now?' and 'What's the biggest thing we're missing about the situation right now? What don't I realize?' — then converts every answer into wiki artifacts (story scope extensions, dated plan retro notes, needs-triage stories, primer Open Questions) so the next cold session starts from corrected truth, never chat-only confessions. Use when the user says "$retro", "run the retro", "retro protocol", "session retro", "retro before we close", "prep the primer", "get the primer ready", "cold session prep", "what are we least confident about", "what are we missing", "what don't you realize", or before any primer rewrite at a session boundary.

Retro — Two Questions Before the Primer

Why this exists

A session ends with a primer rewrite so the next cold session starts from truth. The primer author is the same model that did the work — the failure mode is inheriting the session's blind spots straight into the "current truth" document. The retro forces a perspective shift BEFORE authoring: interrogate the session's confidence, convert what surfaces into artifacts, then write the primer from the corrected state.

Verification gates check what you claimed. The retro asks what you did not claim. Precedent: a session's retro surfaced that a just-shipped containment check was looser than its intent and that a fail-closed gate needed to cover a second edge kind — both became story scope extensions, one became a shipped fix. No gate would have caught either, because no claim covered them.

Prerequisites

• WIKI_SCOPE: <scope> declared in the project instructions. If missing, suggest $wiki.
• An active plan for the scope (dated retro notes land there). Without one, answers route to the primer's Open Questions only.

When it runs

• MANDATORY before authoring or resyncing the primer at a session boundary.
• Worth running at any milestone even mid-session: a release cut, a fix batch drained, a plan phase flip.

The protocol

Step 1 — Answer the two questions

In order, in the visible response:

1. What are you least confident about right now?
2. What's the biggest thing we're missing about the situation right now? What don't I realize?

Answering rules:

• Answers are about the WORK, not the worker. Name code, artifacts, and measurements — never feelings, apologies, or process narrative.
• Every answer carries a location (file, story, number) and a falsification path: what a future session runs or reads to confirm or kill the concern.
• Question 2 demands the perspective shift: re-read the session's own claims as a skeptic. What blind spot did every gate share? What would an adversarial reviewer probe first? What state does the session assume persists that nothing actually verifies?
• Banned: performative humility ("mistakes may have been made"), vacuous confidence ("everything is verified"), and re-announcing already-filed open stories as discoveries — reference them instead.
• "Nothing" is not an acceptable answer to either question. There is always a least-confident item; if all concerns feel small, rank them and name the top one.

Step 2 — Convert answers to artifacts

Nothing stays only in chat. Route each answer by shape:

Answer shape	Artifact
Unverified claim about landed work	"Not verified" in the session report + verification-debt note in the owning story or plan
Suspected gap or unprobed surface	needs-triage story per the scope's findings protocol
Invalidated or shaky assumption	Correct the story/ADR/plan where the assumption lives; scope extension if acceptance changes
Risk that shapes sequencing	Dated "Session-retro note" in the active plan (release-vs-more-work calls get recorded this way)
Residual uncertainty worth carrying	Primer Open Questions entry

Step 3 — Then, and only then, the primer

Author the primer update with the retro's residue incorporated. The primer must cold-start: a session with zero conversational context recovers the what, the why, and the open risks. Where Step 2 produced artifacts, the primer references them rather than restating.

Output shape

Visible response: the two answers (each with location and falsification path), then the artifact list (file -> what changed). No separate report document — the artifacts are the output.

Anti-patterns

• Running the retro AFTER the primer is written: the primer inherits exactly the blind spots the retro exists to catch.
• Confession register: wiki artifacts store project state, not behavioral postmortems. The retro outputs corrections and open questions, never narrative about the agent.
• Artifact-free retro: answers with zero Step 2 conversions mean the answers were vacuous or the conversion was skipped. Both fail the protocol.