learn-from-the-week

name	learn-from-the-week
description	Read the week's failures, verdicts and flagged work, find what went wrong more than once, and turn each repeated pattern into one exact file edit. Use as the second step of the weekly tune-up.
audience	team

Learning from the week

The team already recorded everything it did. This step is the only one that reads it back and asks what should we do differently, which is the difference between a system that improves and one that merely accumulates history.

The rule that keeps this honest

Twice, or it is not a pattern.

One bad draft is a bad draft. The same weakness in two drafts is a missing rubric line. A rule written from a single incident is usually wrong, and it makes the team worse while looking like progress — so it is the one thing you must not do here.

State the count for every proposal. "Happened twice this week (Tuesday's post, Thursday's newsletter)" is a proposal. "This could be improved" is not.

1. Read four sources

Source	What you are looking for
runs/<YYYY-MM>/ last 7 days	Every failed, blocked, partial run. The evidence field says what actually happened; the summary says what the agent believed
quality/verdicts/ last 7 days	Every edited and rejected verdict. The edits are the data — what the owner changed, twice or more
tasks/	Cards still todo that the sweep could not act on, and every flagged-* card
The previous tune-up	agents/orchestrator/output/ — the proposals it made

2. Check the loop actually closed

Before proposing anything new, answer this: did last week's proposals get done?

• Done — say so in one line each.
• Still open — say so, and do not propose them again. Repeating an ignored proposal weekly is how a report becomes wallpaper.
• Three weeks of proposals with none applied — stop proposing. Report that single fact as the week's only finding. The bottleneck is not the team's learning, it is that nothing is being applied, and burying that under five new ideas hides the one thing that matters.

3. Find the repeats

Group by cause, not by symptom. Three drafts failing on three different rubric lines is three one-offs. Three drafts failing on the same line is one pattern with a name.

Common shapes, and what each usually means:

Pattern	Usually means
Same rubric line failing repeatedly	The writing guidance is missing something, not the writer
Editor passed, owner rejected — twice	The rubric is measuring the wrong thing. This is the most valuable finding available
Same connector blocking runs	A connector problem, escalated to a card, not a prompt problem
A workflow that never produces anything to grade	The job may not be worth its slot in the run cap
An agent's runs consistently partial	Its job is too big for one run, or its brief is vague

4. Write at most three proposals

Three. Not eight. A tune-up that proposes eight changes gets none of them applied, and you will read that same list back next Sunday.

Each proposal names the file and the exact text:

### 1. Openings keep getting rewritten (3 times: Aug 18, Aug 20, Aug 21)

**File:** `shared/writing-rules.md`
**Add:** "Open on something that happened to me, never on a category statement about the
industry."
**Why:** all three edits replaced a category opening with a personal one.

A proposal without exact replacement text is advice, and nobody can apply advice.

5. Sort into applied and proposed

This is the line, and it does not move:

The tune-up may write down what it learned. It may not change how the team is wired.

Applied directly by the next step	Raised as a task card, for the owner
A rule into shared/writing-rules.md	Changing an agent's model
A line into a rubric in shared/standards/rubrics/	Pulling an upstream change
A claim into the verified claims register	Re-authorising or removing a connector
Anything already decided by a captured verdict	Rewriting a skill, adding or retiring a workflow

If you cannot tell which column a proposal belongs in, it belongs in the right-hand one.

6. Hand off

Pass to write-tune-up: the loop-closure check, the repeats with their counts, the three proposals, and which column each one sits in.