| name | levelup |
| description | Use after a correction or review finding worth remembering, when standards may have drifted from the live ecosystem, when switching MasterMind to a new domain or stack, or when the user says "remember this", "learn from that", "level up", "update your knowledge". |
MasterMind — Level Up
MasterMind improves by editing its own knowledge base (its weights are fixed). This skill is the
disciplined loop that does it. Read ~/.mastermind/engineering/active-field.md first to know the active
field and its pack path (engineering/fields/<field>/).
Pick exactly one mode
Take the mode from the argument; default to capture. Do one mode per run — they touch different
files under different rules, and blending them is how a lesson lands in the wrong file.
| Mode | Trigger | Read |
|---|
capture (default) | a correction, review finding, or bug worth remembering | below — it's the whole job |
refresh | standards may have drifted from the live ecosystem | refresh.md before writing anything — it carries the upstream-only write allowlist |
bootstrap <field> | a new domain or stack with no pack | bootstrap.md |
Adding or rewriting a skill or agent is not a mode — it's a separate discipline: read authoring.md.
capture (default) — harvest lessons from this session/recent work
- Scan the recent work for durable, generalizable lessons: user corrections ("no, do X"), real
code-reviewer findings, bugs fixed, and choices that proved right. Ignore one-off/project-specific
noise — only keep what will apply to future tasks.
- For each: append a one-line rule + bracketed "why" to
~/.mastermind/engineering/fields/<field>/lessons.md. Deduplicate against existing lessons.
- If a lesson is a general default (not just a gotcha), promote it into
stack-defaults.md at the
right section — that's where it will actually change behavior.
- Keep it tight. A lesson that isn't load-bearing is noise; don't hoard.
capture is the one mode that may run on a user's install and stay local; it writes only to that field's
lessons.md and stack-defaults.md.
Guardrail: keep MasterMind lean (token economy)
Every line is paid in context on every future session, so leveling up must net toward leaner, not
heavier. On each change:
- Only load-bearing lines survive. For each line ask "would removing it change behavior?" — if
not, cut it. Prefer a sharper sentence over a longer one, a rule over an example, a pointer over a copy.
- Kernel stays tiny. New depth goes into on-demand modules/field packs, never the always-loaded
CLAUDE.md. Deduplicate — one idea, one home (SSOT); cross-link instead of repeating.
- Net-zero-or-lighter. When you add, hunt for something stale to remove; retire superseded
lessons/resources rather than stacking them. Signal density beats volume — a bloated brain gets ignored.
Always, after any mode
- Bump the level and log the change in
active-field.md (increment the level number; add a dated
one-line changelog entry describing what leveled up).
- Show what changed — list the files you actually wrote. For
refresh, check that list against its
write allowlist before claiming done.
- Report to the user what was learned/changed in 2–3 lines. Improvement must be visible.
- If
~/.mastermind/engineering/ is a git repo, the change is now diffable and reversible — mention it.
