| name | bank-the-suite |
| description | Use after completing any unit of work in a repo that has a real test suite — before starting the next task, compacting context, or declaring done. Runs the FULL suite (not just the tests near the change), in the background and parallelized when it's slow, and 'banks' a green state: honest pass/fail counts, pre-existing failures explicitly carved out by name, no moving on while red is unexplained. Use when the agent only ran the two tests it just wrote, when a long suite keeps getting skipped 'for speed', when failures are described vaguely ('a few unrelated tests fail'), or when work is about to stack on top of an unverified base. |
Bank the Suite
The failure mode this fixes
The agent changes a module, runs the three tests next to it, sees green, and moves on. Four tasks later the full suite runs for the first time and 23 tests are red — and now nobody knows which of the four changes broke them, the context that would have made the diagnosis cheap is gone, and the "quick fix" becomes an archaeology dig.
The inverse failure is just as common: the suite is run, 14 tests fail, and the report says "some pre-existing failures, probably unrelated." Probably. Unverified red is a debt that compounds — every subsequent change hides behind it.
This skill makes the full suite a bank: after each unit of work you deposit a verified green state, so the next unit starts from known-good and any new red has exactly one suspect.
When to Use This Skill
- A feature, fix, or refactor just landed and the next task is queued
- Only the tests adjacent to the change were run
- You're about to compact context, hand off, or end the session — the next session needs a trusted baseline
- The suite is slow and keeps getting skipped because "it takes 20 minutes"
- A report says failures are "pre-existing" or "unrelated" without naming them
Don't use when: the repo has no meaningful suite (then the gap is the finding — say so), or mid-exploration when nothing has landed yet. Don't block a one-character doc fix on a 20-minute suite — scale the gate to the blast radius.
Instructions
1. Establish the baseline once
Before the first change of the session, know what the suite looks like clean: total collected, passing, and any already-failing tests by name. If you skipped this and the suite is now red, check the failing tests against the main branch / pre-change state before assuming your change caused it — but check, don't assume.
2. Run the whole thing, not the neighborhood
Tests near the change verify the change; the rest of the suite verifies the blast radius — the callers, the shared fixtures, the serialization someone else depends on. The failures that hurt are always in code you didn't think you touched. If a full run is genuinely too slow for every iteration, run the affected subset per iteration and the full suite at the unit boundary — but the unit doesn't close until the full run is green.
3. Run it in the background, keep working
A slow suite is not a reason to skip it — it's a reason to parallelize it (pytest -n auto, sharded CI, whatever the stack offers) and to kick it off in the background while you write the report or prep the next task. The rule isn't "wait 20 minutes"; it's "don't start stacking the next change on an unverified base."
4. Account for every red, by name
A finishing run has three acceptable descriptions for a failing test, and "probably unrelated" is not one of them:
- Caused by this change → fix it now, or revert.
- Pre-existing → named, and verified failing before the change (re-run it on the base state if you didn't capture the baseline).
- Newly flaky → demonstrated by re-run, and reported as its own finding — flakiness is a defect, not noise.
5. Bank it and say so
Close the unit with an explicit deposit: counts, deltas from baseline, named carve-outs. That line is what lets the next task — or the next session, or another agent — start without re-verifying the world.
Output format
Suite banked: <suite/command>
Result: <passed>/<collected> passed in <time> (baseline: <passed>/<collected>)
New failures: <none | list — each fixed or reverted before closing>
Pre-existing failures (verified, not introduced here): <named list | none>
Flaky: <named list with re-run evidence | none>
Safe to build on: yes / no because <reason>
Anti-Patterns
| Anti-Pattern | Why it defeats the skill |
|---|
| Neighborhood green | running only the tests you just wrote and reporting "tests pass." |
| "Probably unrelated" | unverified attribution of red to someone else. Verify or own it. |
| Stacking on red | starting task N+1 while task N's suite status is unknown. One suspect becomes four. |
| Skipping because slow | the suite's runtime is an engineering problem (parallelize, shard, background it), never a waiver. |
| Counts-only reporting | "all green" with no baseline comparison hides the test that silently stopped being collected. |
Mental Model
The suite is a bank account: each unit of work ends with a deposit of verified green, and every deposit has a receipt. You can move fast precisely because you never have to wonder whether the last balance was real.
