name: retro description: > Reflect on a task (this conversation plus any subagent sub-sessions it spawned) to find ways to improve the agent's skills and config. Use for "retro", "retrospective", "reflect on this conversation", "what could be improved", or "extract a skill from this". metadata: version: "1.0.1"

Retro

Run a retrospective on the task. Use what actually happened as evidence and surface concrete improvements to the agent's own configuration. Analyze and recommend first; apply changes only after the user approves.

Scope

Ground the retro in every session the task touched, not only this conversation. If the task spawned subagents or sub-sessions (stages you drove but never saw inside), the sharpest evidence lives there: struggles, tool errors, dead-ends, and the re-steers that unblocked them. Find and read them first (see the pi-sessions skill), identifying them by the task's time window and working directory (a task may span more than one repo); sub-sessions persist as ordinary session files. Skim for trouble and interventions rather than reading each verbatim. Absent sub-sessions, reflect on this conversation alone.

Evidence to mine

Read back over the sessions for signals:

• Tool-call failures, retries, and dead ends the agent worked around.
• User corrections and re-steers ("no, do X", "I told you already").
• Expressed frustration or repeated requests for the same clarification.
• Manual or repetitive workflows the agent rebuilt from scratch that a skill

could have supplied.

• Domain knowledge or gotchas the agent only learned mid-session.
• A skill that was loaded but lacked a detail, causing a misstep.
• Guidance that is never used, ignored, duplicated across files, contradicted

by another source, or longer than the behaviour it produces.

• Other indicators of problems or inefficiencies

What to produce

A prioritized list of findings. For each: the evidence from the conversation, the proposed change, and the target file. Categorize:

• Skills to extract: a recurring, reusable workflow not yet captured.

Propose a name and what it would contain.

• Skills to update: name the existing skill and the specific detail, gotcha,

or constraint to add so it works better next time.

• Prompt-template / AGENTS.md / config gaps: where appropriate.
• Simplify or remove: guidance to cut, merge into one source, or shorten,

with the evidence that the change keeps the behaviour.

• Not worth encoding: one-off mistakes that should not become permanent

guidance. Call these out so the config does not over-fit a single incident.

Prefer changes that generalize. A single failure is not automatically a skill.

Applying

Present findings and let the user choose what to apply. Do not edit config files during analysis.