| 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.
