basnijholt/baspowers/diagnosing-baspowers

Diagnosing Baspowers

Overview

Pin down with your human partner what went wrong in a session, read the transcripts on disk, and report what happened with evidence. Where baspowers skill text contributed, quote it and propose a change: your human partner maintains these skills and decides what changes.

Core principle: Every finding cites path:line. No citation, no finding. Every number comes from the transcript or from a command you ran, never from memory.

Workflow

Create a todo per step. Step 5 runs only on its stated condition.

1. Problem intake. Ask one question at a time until you can write a

statement naming the session(s), the turn range if known, what your partner expected, what happened, and the observable they care about (wall-clock, tokens, repeated actions, one specific action). "It took too long" is a complaint, not a problem statement.

1. Locate. Resolve each session to verified absolute filesystem paths using

references/session-discovery.md. Confirm a past session by quoting its first prompt and timestamp, and list every candidate you rejected with the reason, or "none". Enumerate subagent transcripts. Create ~/.baspowers/diagnosing-baspowers/<session-id>/, tell your partner the path, and fill templates/case.md there, following its provenance rules for environment and skill observations.

1. Triage. Read the region around the reported problem yourself. Then

dispatch one analyst subagent per dimension in parallel, each given the case file path, prompts/analyst-common.md, and one dimension file from prompts/: skill-timeline.md, plan-adherence.md, repeated-work.md, stumbles.md, quality-evidence.md, request-conflicts.md, cost-and-time.md. Split a dimension by turn range when the transcript is long. Discard any returned finding without path:line.

1. Report. Fill every section of templates/report.md in order, write

it to the workspace, show it, and give the path. Check what cited content actually proves and preserve the supporting case; a symlink alias is not a redundant copy.

1. Similar sessions — when asked. Turn confirmed findings into a

signature, list candidates by mtime and size, find marker line numbers, dispatch prompts/similar-session.md per candidate in parallel, and append report §9.

Quick reference

All seven analysts always run. This table says which region to read yourself in step 3 and which findings to lead with in the verdict.

Hard rules

• Context safety. One transcript line can be a megabyte. Follow

references/context-safety.md on every session file, every time.

• Read-only. Never modify, move, or delete a session file.
• Exact paths to subagents. A subagent's "current session" is its

own. Pass absolute paths and ids.

• Human prompts only. Hook output, system reminders, and tool results

are not your partner's words. In a subagent transcript, "user" is the parent agent.

• Propose, don't edit. Report §7 names the skill text involved, with

path:line in the skill and in the transcript, and proposes a change. Never edit a skill during diagnosis; changing it is a separate task your partner starts.

• Intake before analysis. Nothing in steps 2–5 starts until your

partner has answered. If they are away, write the questions and stop. A statement you reconstructed for them is not an answer. An already-scoped request — one specific event, what is running now, or the analysis to run — is itself the statement: answer it, then ask. A whole-session "why" is a complaint.

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