self-improvement

name	self-improvement
description	When you encounter a failure, correction, or new pattern, write a learning and optionally propose a skill.

When to Activate

• A tool call fails unexpectedly
• The human corrects you
• You discover a better approach to something you've done before
• You notice a pattern across multiple tasks
• An external tool or API behaves differently than expected
• You surface friction, limitations, or architectural gaps during any work (not just reflection passes) — these are observations that the factory should know about

What to Do

1. Write a learning to the appropriate directory:

   • learnings/failures/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{project}-{summary}.md for failures
   • learnings/corrections/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{summary}.md for human corrections
   • learnings/discoveries/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{summary}.md for new patterns

   Include: what happened, what you expected, what actually occurred, what you learned, what should change.

2. If the learning suggests a reusable skill (something that would help ANY agent in similar future situations):

   • Write a SKILL.md to skills/proposed/{skill-name}/SKILL.md
   • Librarian will review it on next heartbeat
   • Keep it concise — under 200 lines. If it's longer, it's trying to do too much.

3. If you surface friction, tooling limitations, or architectural gaps during work, write an observation entry to memory/{your-agent-name}/needs.md using the human-action-needed skill (category: observation). This makes the observation durable — prose in your response text is ephemeral and the factory cannot act on it. The kernel post-run pass automatically promotes observation entries from needs.md to specs/factory-internal/ for structured operator triage via factory triage.

4. Update your daily log with a brief note about the learning.

What NOT to Do

• Don't modify skills in skills/shared/ directly — always propose via skills/proposed/
• Don't write a skill for something that happened once. Wait for patterns (2-3 occurrences).
• Don't write learnings that are just "this didn't work." Always include analysis: WHY it didn't work and what to do differently.
• Don't write a skill that duplicates an existing one. Check skills/shared/ first.