improve

name	improve
description	Autonomous self-improvement loop for aireceipts: research the field, build one proven increment, prove it on a corpus the agent didn't author, land it on an integration branch. Never touches main. Use for 'keep improving aireceipts', 'run the improve loop', or /loop /improve.
trigger	/improve

/improve — one proven increment, then stop

Each invocation advances the product by exactly one well-chosen, fully-proven increment. Default to not building — activity is not progress, shipped value is.

Non-negotiables

• Never touch main. Accumulate on loop/integration (branched off origin/main, rebased when main moves). One rolling draft PR loop/integration → main; the maintainer merges it.
• Every capability passes a go/no-go before coding and a value gate after. Killing a noisy waste-check counts as progress.
• Honor I1–I6 (AGENTS.md) without exception.

1. THINK

• git fetch. If a prior branch conflicts or loop/integration's CI is red, fix that first — nothing new until it's green.
• Research the field (arXiv, competing tools, prior art) and real transcripts to learn which waste patterns actually occur and how often. Evidence over intuition.
• Pick the single highest-leverage move. Sharpening a shipped waste-check or fixing a real false positive usually beats a marginal new one.
• Go/No-Go, written down with a kill criterion: does it occur in real transcripts? Deterministic (I1)? Near-zero false positives? Non-redundant? Worth the receipt's visual budget? Any weak answer → drop it, pick again. If it passes, run /write-spec for a tight, file:line-grounded draft citing the research.

2. BUILD

git checkout -b feat/<slug> loop/integration. Smallest change that satisfies the spec. Reuse existing primitives.

3. PROVE — nothing is committed until every gate is green

• Unmasked gate (see build-spec's section 4) — all four commands, checked via $?.
• Value gate (the moat): run the change against a corpus you did not author as its fixtures — real transcripts under ~/.claude/projects/** or similar. Require at least one genuine hit, zero false positives across a clean negative corpus, and clearly non-redundant value. Record the numbers in the spec's Test matrix.
• Self-review: run /review-pr on the diff before landing; resolve what it surfaces.
• A failed bar = do not ship. Mark the spec status: rejected with a filled Tombstone — preserve the reasoning, never delete a rejected spec.

4. LAND

Keep the spec at status: building (shipped is flipped only after the human merges), merge the feature branch into loop/integration, refresh the rolling draft PR's description, then stop.

Stop & surface

Explicit user stop · a cost/iteration ceiling · an idea failing the value gate twice · loop/integration CI red you can't fix · a load-bearing ambiguity needing the maintainer's call. Never merge to main to unblock any of these.