instinct-extraction

name	instinct-extraction
description	Mines completed sessions for repeating {tool sequence → outcome} tuples. Scores by frequency × success_rate × novelty. High-scoring tuples become "instincts" — candidate skill seeds — in instincts/pending/.
when_to_use	["run automatically by hooks/instinct-extractor.js on every Stop event","run manually via /instinct-status to inspect what was mined recently","run as part of /evolve to cluster confirmed instincts into a new skill"]
brd_ref	§4.4

Continuous learning: instinct extraction

The harness has many turns. Most are noise; some encode skill — a recurring sequence of tool calls that, in this codebase, in this project, reliably produces a desired outcome.

The instinct-extractor mines these patterns at session end:

score = frequency × 0.4 + success_rate × 0.4 + novelty × 0.2

with initial weights to be tuned from telemetry per BRD §9 open question 3.

Lifecycle

pending     -- auto-extracted; lives 30 days max unless promoted
tentative   -- /evolve promoted after Critic validation; tracked over N sessions
confirmed   -- held up over N sessions; ready to cluster into a skill
skill       -- clustered instincts merged into skills/ by /evolve

Hard rules

• Pending instincts are local to a project's instincts/pending/. Cross-project sharing is via /instinct-export + /instinct-import, which require explicit user action.
• Promotion always goes through the Critic. No auto-promotion past pending. The risk of a bad instinct hardening into a skill is too high.
• Auto-prune is mechanical. Pending instincts older than 30 days are deleted by a periodic CI job (not by this hook directly).
• The extractor never writes to skills/ or learnings/. Those are downstream of /evolve.

What makes a good instinct candidate

• Recurs in >= 2 turns of the same session.
• Has high success_rate (the sequence consistently led to a non-error outcome).
• Is novel (not already in instincts/.seen-hashes.txt).
• Is short enough to be reusable (length 2-4 tool calls). Longer sequences are usually project-specific scripts, not instincts.

Source

Pattern from affaan-m/everything-claude-code/skills/continuous-learning-v2/ (MIT). See hooks/instinct-extractor.js for the implementation, commands/evolve.md for the promotion path, and BRD §10.3 §4.4.