| name | auto-reflect |
| description | Turn confirmed workflow failures into small durable recurrence guards. Use after a user correction, verified false claim, confirmed implementation mistake, or repeated-failure circuit-breaker event; do not use for speculation, preference changes, expected failing tests, or unrelated environment failures. |
Auto Reflect
Record only confirmed failures and install the smallest safe guard that would prevent recurrence. Keep reflection short; it must save future work rather than become another workflow.
Workflow
- Capture the evidence that confirms the failure. Label causal statements as measured, read in source, or hypothesis; only the first two can justify a durable rule.
- Separate symptom, confirmed cause, contributing condition, and impact. Redact secrets and unrelated personal/project data.
- Assign a stable recurrence key such as
verification.claim-without-exit-code and search the learning ledger for prior occurrences.
- Choose the minimum guard:
- first occurrence: add a run-local checklist/precheck;
- second confirmed equivalent occurrence: update the narrowest relevant skill or project instruction;
- third or later: add a hard deterministic precheck/circuit breaker, or stop for user intervention when automation would be unsafe.
- Verify the guard with the smallest deterministic scenario that would have caught the failure. If a skill changed, run its structural validator.
- Append a compact record to
~/.auto-master/artifacts/_learning/confirmed-failures.jsonl: timestamp, recurrence key, scope, evidence type, confirmed cause, guard, verification, and occurrence count.
Boundaries
- Do not promote hypotheses, reviewer opinions, one-off machine faults, or taste changes into permanent rules.
- Do not edit project instructions unless the current task authorizes instruction changes and the rule is project-specific. Prefer the owning skill for reusable workflow rules.
- Do not silently weaken tests or acceptance criteria to make a failure disappear.
- Do not spawn a reviewer by default. Use one fresh-context review only when the proposed guard changes security, auth, data safety, execution isolation, release policy, or another critical boundary.
- Never log secrets, raw auth/config values, giant outputs, or private identity data.
Report
Report recurrence key, confirmation evidence, cause, guard location, verification result, occurrence count, and whether any hypothesis remains. If no durable guard is justified, say so and record nothing permanent.
