ticket-compound

name	ticket-compound
description	Compound-engineering capture + curation for a finished ticket — the engineering feedback loop. Harvests the Friction sections that phase agents left in their artifacts plus the git diff, writes a structured entry to the shared learnings store (thoughts/shared/learnings/), prunes/amends stale notes there autonomously, captures new domain vocabulary to thoughts/shared/CONCEPTS.md, and PROPOSES (for human approval) any ADR change. Non-blocking — runs after a ticket ships or fails, never on the critical path. Use when the user says "compound this ticket", "capture learnings", "what did we learn", or run as /catalyst-dev:ticket-compound <TICKET> [mode:headless].
disable-model-invocation	true
user-invocable	true
allowed-tools	Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Grep, Glob, Task, AskUserQuestion

ticket-compound — engineering compound loop

Capture what a ticket taught us into the shared store (thoughts/ + ADRs), so future agents on any machine make better decisions. This is research-curate evolved from inventory to action. Read reference.md (this dir) for the learnings-store schema before writing anything.

Two authority levels (hard rule):

• Autonomous — write/append/update/delete in thoughts/shared/learnings/ and thoughts/shared/CONCEPTS.md, and prune stale notes in thoughts/shared/{research,plans}/.
• Propose only (APPROVE-gated) — any change to docs/adrs.md. Never edit an ADR directly; queue it for the morning ritual to approve.

Invocation

/catalyst-dev:ticket-compound <TICKET> [mode:headless]

• <TICKET> — Linear key (e.g. CTL-619). If omitted, detect from the branch / CATALYST_TICKET.
• mode:headless — non-interactive: apply all unambiguous autonomous actions silently, mark ambiguous learnings status: stale, never block on a prompt, end with the sentinel line. This is what the morning ritual (and, later, the daemon) use. Default is interactive.

Step 1 — Gather raw signal (the orchestrator reads; do NOT delegate writes)

For <TICKET>, collect:

1. Friction — every ## Friction / friction: block the phase agents left in their artifacts: thoughts/shared/{research,plans}/*<TICKET>*.md and the worker signal files ~/catalyst/workers/<TICKET>/*.json.
   • thoughts/shared/friction/<TICKET>.md — the dedicated per-phase friction log (primary friction source).
2. The diff — git log --oneline origin/main..HEAD and git diff --stat origin/main..HEAD (or the merged SHA from phase-monitor-merge.json).
3. Ticket — read via direct SQL against the replica (title, description, final state, estimate); see the linearis skill's "Reading Linear" section.
4. Event trail (optional) — the ticket's lines in ~/catalyst/events/YYYY-MM.jsonl.

Capture learnings from failed/abandoned tickets too — the dead-ends are high-signal ("what didn't work" is a first-class section).

Step 2 — Three TEXT-ONLY sub-agents (parallel; they return text, never write files)

Spawn via Task, all at once. Each returns text to you; you do the single write in Step 3 (avoids partial-write races):

• Context Analyzer — from the diff + ticket + friction, pick the track (bug vs knowledge), problem_type, category (subdir), component, severity, and a filename slug. Returns the frontmatter skeleton (validate against reference.md).
• Solution Extractor — write the entry body per the track's template (bug: Problem/Symptoms/What Didn't Work/Solution/Why This Works/Prevention; knowledge: Context/Guidance/Why This Matters/When to Apply/Examples). Ground every claim in the diff/friction — no invention.
• Related-Learnings Finder — rg -li "<keywords>" thoughts/shared/learnings/**/*.md, read the frontmatter of hits, and score overlap (problem, root cause, component, files, prevention). Returns HIGH (4–5) / MODERATE (2–3) / LOW (0–1) plus the matched paths.

Step 3 — Assemble + write ONE learnings entry (overlap routing)

• HIGH overlap → update the existing entry in place (merge new detail, set last_updated:), rather than creating a near-duplicate. This is the anti-bloat rule.
• MODERATE/LOW → create thoughts/shared/learnings/<category>/<slug>.md.

Then validate frontmatter (fail loud on the YAML traps in reference.md):

bash "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT:-plugins/dev}/scripts/compound/validate-learnings.sh" "<written-path>"

Step 4 — Curate the store (five outcomes, autonomous in thoughts/)

For the related entries the Finder surfaced, classify and act — autonomously (this is the thoughts/ layer):

Outcome	When	Action
Keep	accurate, refs valid	none
Update	core correct, refs/paths drifted	targeted in-place edit
Consolidate	2+ heavily overlap, both correct	merge into the canonical, delete the subsumed
Replace	core guidance now misleading	write successor, delete old
Delete	implementation gone AND domain gone AND no inbound links	remove (git history preserves)

Same five-outcome pass applies to stale thoughts/shared/{research,plans}/ notes this ticket contradicted (the "off-track context that got us redirected"). In mode:headless, only act on unambiguous cases; mark the rest status: stale + stale_reason.

Step 5 — Vocabulary → CONCEPTS.md (autonomous)

Scan the diff + friction for Catalyst domain terms not yet in thoughts/shared/CONCEPTS.md (e.g. "reclaim", "revive-budget", "orphan", "signal ownership"). Append concise definitions. Create the file if absent.

Step 6 — ADR changes → PROPOSE, never apply

If a learning rises to a standing rule (something every agent must always do/avoid), do NOT edit docs/adrs.md. Append a proposal to the approval queue:

thoughts/shared/compound/pending/<TICKET>.md

Each proposal: the target ADR (new / amend ADR-NNN / supersede ADR-NNN), the exact proposed text, and a one-line rationale + evidence (ticket + learning path). The morning ritual surfaces these; a human approves via briefing-followup's action-compound handler, which is the only thing that writes docs/adrs.md.

Step 7 — Discoverability check (pointer only)

Confirm CLAUDE.md teaches agents that the learnings store exists, its shape, and when to grep it. If not, propose (interactive) / apply (headless) a minimal pointer — never the learnings themselves:

thoughts/shared/learnings/ — past problem→solution entries (grep by component/tags/problem_type).
Search before implementing or debugging in a known area. Curated by /catalyst-dev:ticket-compound.

Step 8 — Report

• Interactive: summarize entry written/updated, curation actions, CONCEPTS additions, and any queued ADR proposals (with the approval command).
• Headless: structured block ending with the grep-able sentinel:

✓ ticket-compound complete (headless)
ticket: CTL-619
entry: thoughts/shared/learnings/orchestrator-issues/daemon-false-dead-first-commit.md (created)
curated: 1 updated, 0 deleted ; concepts: +2 ; adr-proposals: 1 (pending approval)
ticket-compound complete

Out of scope (this slice)

• The daemon firing this automatically after monitor-deploy (manual / morning-ritual triggered for now).
• The estimation loop (separate slice — compound-estimate owns estimation numbers).
• ticket-retro (the cross-ticket view — separate slice).