retro

name

retro

description

Time-windowed retrospective on a project's past work. Reads taskmaster artifacts (handovers, lessons, issues, ideas) and git log to produce a markdown report plus concrete proposals routed back through taskmaster. Invoke when the user says 'retro the last week', 'run a retrospective', 'do a post-mortem', 'what did we accomplish this week', 'wrap up the sprint', 'how did we work in CodeMaestro', 'review our recent sessions', 'what worked and what didn't this sprint', 'look back at this project'. Accepts depth=shallow|standard (deep is v1.1) and --project <path> (defaults to cwd).

retro — Time-windowed project retrospective

Run the SCAN → ANALYZE → SYNTHESIZE → EMIT pipeline. v1 supports depth=shallow and depth=standard. Deep depth (adversarial + transcript grep) is fast-follow.

(Note: retro intentionally skips the ADVERSARIAL phase that harvest and plugin-audit use, because retro's output is descriptive — "what happened" — not prescriptive. The proposer's self-praise risk is lower for retrospective synthesis than for forward-looking workflow design. If retro's standard depth ever produces ≥4 high-blast-radius proposals, consider promoting to deep depth in v1.1, which will include adversarial.)

Parameters

Param	Default	Values
depth	standard	shallow (last 1–3 sessions), standard (last 7 days)
--project <path>	cwd	Absolute path or relative-to-cwd. Walks up to find .taskmaster/ or .git.

If user asks for depth=deep: respond that deep ships in v1.1 (docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-11-reflect-auto-improve-design.md §8 stretch) and offer standard instead.

SCAN Phase

Read these in parallel using Glob/Read/Bash:

1. <project>/.taskmaster/backlog.yaml — overall state.
2. <project>/.taskmaster/handovers/*.md — pick last N for shallow (3), last week's worth for standard.
3. <project>/.taskmaster/lessons/*.md — all lessons; flag any reinforced in window.
4. <project>/.taskmaster/issues/*.md — filter by status=open or status changed in window.
5. <project>/.taskmaster/ideas/*.md — recent ideas (created in window).
6. git log --since=<window> --oneline and git log --since=<window> --stat (use Bash).

For depth=shallow, just (1), last 3 of (2), and git log -n 30 --oneline.

Digest the scan output to ≤2000 tokens before passing to the proposer — bullet summaries, not raw file dumps.

ANALYZE Phase (proposer sub-agent)

Dispatch via Agent tool. Model selection:

• shallow: do NOT dispatch a sub-agent. Synthesize directly in main context (Sonnet/Opus per session model).
• standard: dispatch sub-agent with model: "sonnet".

Sub-agent prompt template:

You are the proposer for a project retrospective. Given the scan digest below, return findings as structured markdown.

# Scan Digest
<scan output here>

# Window
<dates>

# Project
<name and path>

Return ONLY this structure (no preamble, no commentary):

## Pain Points
- summary: <one line>
  evidence: <handover ID / commit SHA / lesson ID>
  severity: P0|P1|P2|P3

## Wins
- summary: <one line>
  evidence: <ref>

## Patterns
- summary: <one line>
  frequency: <occurrences in window>
  evidence: <refs>

## Proposals
- kind: issue|idea|lesson
  title: <concise>
  rationale: <2-3 sentences>
  blast_radius: small|medium|large

Cap proposals at 8 total.

SYNTHESIZE Phase

(standard depth only — shallow skips and goes straight to EMIT with the proposer-free analysis.)

In main context:

• Trim to ≤10 proposals max.
• Assign confidence (high / medium / low) based on evidence count.
• Resolve duplicate ideas (e.g. multiple pain points naming the same workflow gap collapse to one proposal).

EMIT Phase

1. Write the report at one of these paths (try in order):

   • <project>/.taskmaster/retros/YYYY-MM-DD-retro-<slug>.md if .taskmaster/ exists.
   • <project>/.reflect/retros/YYYY-MM-DD-retro-<slug>.md otherwise (create dir if needed).

   Report sections: Header (date / project / window / depth) → Pain Points → Wins → Patterns → Proposals (with confidence) → Open Questions.

2. Route each proposal via the taskmaster gate skills into the target project's backlog. Always include a reflect:retro tag/label.

   • kind: issue → invoke taskmaster:issue skill (do NOT call backlog_issue_create directly — that bypasses the gate). Pass severity from proposer; map P0/P1 → high, P2 → medium, P3 → low.
   • kind: idea → call mcp__plugin_taskmaster_tm__backlog_idea_create directly with created_by="Claude" (the sanctioned auto-log path documented in taskmaster:add-idea).

   Why ideas go direct while issues/lessons go through skill gates: taskmaster:add-idea documents a Claude-initiated carve-out (created_by="Claude") for auto-log paths like this one. taskmaster:issue and taskmaster:lesson have no such carve-out and must route through their gate skills.

   • kind: lesson → invoke taskmaster:lesson skill (do NOT call backlog_lesson_create directly).

   If the target project lacks taskmaster initialization, skip routing and list proposals in the report only. Tell the user.

3. Final message to user: one short paragraph + path to report + bulleted list of created artifacts with IDs.

What this Skill Does NOT Do

• Does not modify any task / lesson / issue beyond creating new ones. No status transitions.
• Does not touch transcripts in v1 (that's depth=deep, v1.1).
• Does not run when scan turns up zero artifacts — emits a "nothing to reflect on" message instead and exits.