ai-agents-docs-of-record

name	ai-agents-docs-of-record
version	1.0.0
license	MIT
description	Runbook for this repo's documents of record. Session logs, ADRs, retrospectives, Serena memories, per-issue handoffs, plus the templates, validators, naming rules, and house prose style that bind them. Use when you say `write the session log`, `create an ADR`, `fill the retro`, `save this to memory`, `which document of record`. Do NOT use for authoring skills (use `SkillForge`) or research write-ups (use `ai-agents-research-methodology`).

ai-agents-docs-of-record

This repo runs on verification-based governance: work that is not recorded in a document of record did not happen (SESSION-PROTOCOL.md, "Trust-Based vs Verification-Based"). This skill is the operating manual for the five record systems, the house style they share, and the decision table for which record a given fact belongs in. Jargon: a "document of record" is an artifact a later session or CI gate treats as authoritative evidence, as opposed to chat output, which evaporates.

Triggers

• write the session log
• create an ADR
• fill the retro
• save this to memory
• which document of record does this go in

The Record System Map

Record	Location	Create with	Validated by
Session log	.agents/sessions/YYYY-MM-DD-session-NN[-slug].json	session-init skill	scripts/validate_session_json.py; CI ai-session-protocol.yml
Per-issue handoff	.agents/sessions/handoffs/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{ISSUE}-handoff.md	copy .agents/templates/HANDOFF.md	resume-verification checklist at next session start
ADR	.agents/architecture/ADR-NNN-slug.md	adr-generator skill	scripts/validation/check_adr_uniqueness.py; adr-review debate gate
Retrospective	.agents/retrospective/	auto-retro skeleton + /retro fill, or retrospective skill	INDEX.md row (auto-appended, incomplete; see Phase 4)
Serena memory	.serena/memories/[domain]-[name].md	memory skill write conventions	curating-memories skill; memory-index routing
Project dashboard	.agents/HANDOFF.md	nobody. READ-ONLY per ADR-014, 5K hard cap	push guard; protocol MUST NOT

Process

Phase 1: Pick the right record

Situation	Record	Why
Any session doing real work	Session log, always	Protocol MUST; CI validates
Issue spans multiple sessions	Per-issue handoff	Cold-start continuity (Issue #1725: 95.8% protocol failure without file-based gates)
Architectural or irreversible decision	ADR	Fires adr-review multi-agent debate
Incident, failure, or "what went wrong"	Retrospective	Feeds the failure canon; see ai-agents-failure-archaeology
Reusable pattern, correction, gotcha	Serena memory	Only memories are read by future sessions at start
User corrected you mid-session	reflect skill, then memory	Corrections not persisted are lost
A doc you touched is stale	Fix on contact (Phase 7)	Broken-windows rule

One fact can need two records: an incident gets a retrospective AND a memory distilling the rule. The retro is the evidence; the memory is the searchable lesson.

Phase 2: Session logs

Session logs are JSON, schema at .agents/schemas/session-log.schema.json (top-level required: session, protocolCompliance with sessionStart and sessionEnd subsections).

Create early. SESSION-PROTOCOL.md Phase 5: the log SHOULD exist within the first 5 tool calls and MUST NOT be deferred to session end.

uv run python "${COPILOT_PLUGIN_ROOT:-${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT:-.claude}}/skills/session-init/scripts/new_session_log.py" \
  --session-number 2601 --objective "Fix issue 2785"
uv run python3 scripts/validate_session_json.py .agents/sessions/<file>.json

Hard requirements enforced by scripts/validate_session_json.py:

• Required session fields: number, date, branch, startingCommit, objective.
• Branch must match ^(feat|fix|docs|chore|refactor|test|ci)/.
• startingCommit must be a 7-40 char lowercase hex SHA.

Naming in current practice (as of 2026-07-03) appends a slug: 2026-06-30-session-2600-skill-tooling-hygiene-taste-lints-naming.json. Let the session-init script produce the name; do not hand-roll it. If the CI session-protocol gate goes red, use session-log-fixer. Session end duties (complete the log, write handoff if an issue stays open, update Serena) belong to session-end. Never resolve a session-log merge conflict with git checkout --ours; the settled rule from the session 1187 incident is take --theirs and rename your own log to the next free number (see ai-agents-failure-archaeology).

Phase 3: ADRs

Numbering collides here; treat numbers as claims, not identity. History: concurrent ADR PRs each picked the same "next" number (Issue #2253), and ADR-058/062/063 each existed twice until the duplicates were renumbered to 069/070/071 (Issue #2228, per the docstring of scripts/validation/check_adr_uniqueness.py). ADR-055 and ADR-024 share the slug github-actions-runner-selection (055 supersedes 024). Rule: when citing an ADR, verify the file content says what you claim, not just the number.

python3 scripts/validation/check_adr_uniqueness.py --print-next

Workflow:

1. Search first: memory-search for prior decisions, then read neighbors in .agents/architecture/ (ADR-007 memory-first: retrieval precedes reasoning).
2. Generate with adr-generator against .agents/architecture/ADR-TEMPLATE.md.
3. Claim the number from --print-next at the last moment before commit.
4. Expect the gate: any ADR-*.md or SESSION-PROTOCOL.md create or edit fires the adr-review multi-agent debate (AGENTS.md, "ADR Review"). Governance-level changes additionally need human approval (AGENTS.md Boundaries: "Ask First: Architecture|New ADRs|Breaking|Security").
5. Lifecycle frontmatter per ADR-073 (accepted 2026-06-19): optional, unenforced Phase-1 fields id, status, date, decision-makers, supersedes, superseded-by, explainer, implemented. Use them on new ADRs; do not backfill mechanically.

Phase 4: Retrospectives

Two skills, different jobs. reflect captures corrections and praise mid-conversation while context is hot. retrospective produces the full artifact (timeline, Five Whys, learning matrix) in .agents/retrospective/.

Retrospectives are written on demand: /retro here, plus the Post-PR Retrospective workflow in CI. Until #3349 a Stop hook also wrote a skeleton at session end stamped <!-- RETRO-STATE: skeleton-pending-fill --> (Issue #2079); that hook is deleted, but skeletons it already wrote are still placeholders rather than records, so fill them with /retro fill YYYY-MM-DD.

INDEX.md was auto-appended by that hook (Issue #1703) and is incomplete: 5 rows against 95 retro files as of 2026-07-03. Nothing appends to it now. Never treat INDEX.md as the catalog; list the directory. Also note retro-cited short SHAs do not resolve locally even with full history present (~1471 commits as of 2026-07-03), so retros and memories, not git archaeology, are the durable history (depth in ai-agents-failure-archaeology).

Retro learnings MUST be persisted to Serena in the same session, not left as prose in the artifact (.serena/memories/retrospective-accuracy.md: "learnings were proposed in the retrospective but then not persisted to Serena, so they will be lost").

Phase 5: Serena memories

Write conventions (canonical text: .claude/skills/memory/SKILL.md, "Serena Write Conventions"):

• File name: [domain]-[descriptive-name].md, lowercase, hyphens. Example: pr-review-security.md.
• Entity ID inside the file: {domain}-{description}, kebab-case, no prefix. File name and entity ID are separate things; do not conflate them.
• Domain index files (skills-*-index.md) are a two-column table ONLY. Insert new rows AFTER the last existing data row, never after the header or delimiter row.
• Register new memories where memory-index (the keyword-to-memory routing map read at session start) will find them.

Curation (marking obsolete, dedupe, bidirectional links) is the curating-memories skill. Search is memory-search (Tier 1); the four-tier model is ADR-063.

Separate-PR rule: .claude/rules/claude-agents.md MUST NOT item 2: "MUST NOT bundle skill code changes with memory changes in the same PR (separate concerns)." Memory edits ride their own PR. The cautionary tale is PR #908, where 53 memory files changed in a PR that started as one CI fix (.agents/retrospective/2026-01-15-pr-908-comprehensive-retrospective.md).

Phase 6: Handoffs

Tier model per ADR-014 and .agents/sessions/handoffs/README.md:

Tier	Location	Scope
Session log	.agents/sessions/*.json	Single session, canonical record
Per-issue handoff	.agents/sessions/handoffs/{date}-{issue}-handoff.md	One issue across sessions; rewritten each session
Per-branch handoff	.agents/handoffs/{branch}/{session}.md	Multi-session branch coordination
Dashboard	.agents/HANDOFF.md	Project-wide, READ-ONLY, 5K hard cap

Start from the template .agents/templates/HANDOFF.md. A handoff must carry a "Verification on Resume" checklist; the next session executes it before any Edit or Write (SESSION-PROTOCOL.md Phase 2.5, a blocking gate). Never edit .agents/HANDOFF.md itself: it had grown to 122KB with an 80%+ per-PR merge conflict rate before ADR-014 froze it (.agents/architecture/ADR-014-distributed-handoff-architecture.md:13-16; AGENTS.md "Never" list).

Phase 7: House style and stale docs

Prose rules (canonical: .claude/rules/voice.md, .claude/rules/universal.md):

• Lead with the point. Name file, line, command, number, or say you do not know.
• No em-dashes or en-dashes anywhere in authored text (universal.md MUST NOT item 5; only tests/hooks/fixtures/ is exempt). Every dash costs a bot review thread.
• No banned vocabulary (voice.md "Banned Vocabulary" section).
• No auto-generated headers or timestamps-as-headers in any authored or generated file (universal.md MUST NOT item 6; rejected by the user three times as of 2025-12-17).
• Block-style YAML arrays only in frontmatter (.agents/governance/PROJECT-CONSTRAINTS.md, Frontmatter constraints table; ADR-040 Amendment). Inline ['a', 'b'] breaks Copilot CLI parsing.
• Run prose-self-check before emitting any session-log narrative, ADR context section, retro, or PR description.

Markdown lint is SCOPED to files you changed. The PR #908 Five Whys traced 53 unrelated memory-file changes to markdownlint --fix **/*.md run repo-wide (retro, Q1-Q4). Lefthook filters staged Markdown and runs the named validator declared in lefthook.yml. Config is .markdownlint-cli2.yaml. Never widen the glob.

Mirror claims (FM-9): any statement that a file "matches", "mirrors", or "aligns with" another source MUST cite the canonical path and quote the load-bearing fragment character-for-character; intentional divergence gets a named divergence section (.agents/governance/FAILURE-MODES.md, failure mode 9; rule text in .claude/rules/canonical-source-mirror.md; heuristic gate scripts/validation/check_canonical_citations.py, warn-only unless STRICT_CANONICAL_CHECK=1). Cost of ignoring it: PR #1887 took 7 fix commits on confident-incorrectness claims.

Fix stale docs on contact. Worked example from before PR #2871: CONTRIBUTING.md line 155 said build/Generate-Agents.ps1 PowerShell invocation until PR #2871 repointed it to build/generate_agents.py. Zero .ps1 build scripts exist (ADR-042 Python migration). When you touch a stale doc: fix the lines on your path, quote the canonical source per FM-9, and flag (do not silently expand into) the rest. Behavioral claims in docs are verified with doc-accuracy.

Anti-Patterns

Anti-pattern	Why it burns you	Evidence
Editing .agents/HANDOFF.md	Read-only per ADR-014; push guards and reviewers reject it	AGENTS.md "Never" list
Deferring the session log to session end	Incomplete records when sessions die; protocol MUST NOT	SESSION-PROTOCOL.md Phase 5
Trusting an ADR number without reading the file	Numbers collided (058/062/063 dupes; 024 vs 055 same slug)	check_adr_uniqueness.py docstring
Repo-wide markdownlint --fix	Reformatted 53 unrelated memory files in PR #908	PR #908 retro Five Whys
Bundling memory changes with skill code in one PR	Violates claude-agents.md MUST NOT 2; scope explosion	PR #908 retro
"Matches X" without a verbatim quote	FM-9 confident-incorrectness; 7 fix commits on PR #1887	FAILURE-MODES.md section 9
Leaving learnings only in the retro artifact	Never read by future sessions	retrospective-accuracy memory
Treating INDEX.md or git log as complete history	5 index rows vs 95 retro files; retro-cited SHAs do not resolve locally	Phase 4
git checkout --ours on session-log conflicts	Corrupted the main session log once	session 1187 incident
Em/en dashes, banned vocab, generated headers	One bot thread per dash, every PR	universal.md MUST NOT 5 and 6

Verification

Before ending any session that produced records:

• Session log exists, created early, and uv run python3 scripts/validate_session_json.py <log> exits 0.
• Any new ADR number came from check_adr_uniqueness.py --print-next and the adr-review gate ran.
• Retro learnings are persisted as Serena memories, not just prose in the retro file.
• New memories follow [domain]-[name].md naming and their index row sits after the last data row.
• Open-issue work has a per-issue handoff with a Verification on Resume checklist.
• grep -rPn '[\x{2013}\x{2014}]' <changed .md files> returns nothing; lint ran scoped to changed files only.
• Every "matches/mirrors" claim quotes its canonical source verbatim.

Provenance and Maintenance

Verified 2026-07-03 against the working tree. Re-verify volatile facts before relying on them:

Fact	Source	Re-verify
Session log MUSTs, blocking phases	.agents/SESSION-PROTOCOL.md (Phases 0-5, 2.5)	grep -n "MUST NOT defer" .agents/SESSION-PROTOCOL.md
Branch naming pattern	scripts/validate_session_json.py (BRANCH_PATTERN)	grep -n "^BRANCH_PATTERN = re.compile" scripts/validate_session_json.py
Schema required keys, top level and nested session	.agents/schemas/session-log.schema.json	python3 -c "import json;s=json.load(open('.agents/schemas/session-log.schema.json'));print(s['required'], s['properties']['session']['required'])"
ADR collision history, next-number helper	scripts/validation/check_adr_uniqueness.py docstring	python3 scripts/validation/check_adr_uniqueness.py --print-next
ADR-073 lifecycle fields	.agents/architecture/ADR-073-adr-lifecycle-frontmatter.md:1-9	head -10 .agents/architecture/ADR-073-adr-lifecycle-frontmatter.md
adr-review fires on ADR/protocol edits	AGENTS.md "ADR Review"	grep -n "adr-review" AGENTS.md
Auto-retro skeleton + marker + /retro fill	.claude/commands/retro.md:1-15	grep -n "RETRO-STATE" .claude/commands/retro.md
Retro corpus size vs INDEX.md coverage	.agents/retrospective/	python3 -c "import pathlib;d=pathlib.Path('.agents/retrospective');f={p.name for p in d.glob('*.md')}-{'INDEX.md'};t=(d/'INDEX.md').read_text();print(len(f),'retro files,',sum(n in t for n in f),'indexed')"
Memory naming + index-row hazard	.claude/skills/memory/SKILL.md "Serena Write Conventions"	grep -n "Serena Write Conventions" .claude/skills/memory/SKILL.md
Memory/skill separate-PR rule	.claude/rules/claude-agents.md MUST NOT item 2	grep -n "same PR" .claude/rules/claude-agents.md
Handoff tiers, HANDOFF.md 5K cap

Maintenance: when a validator, template path, or protocol phase changes, update the matching row here in the same PR. This file is itself a document of record; it obeys everything it prescribes.