rlagksqls17/harness_template/re0-memo

Turn a completed cycle into lessons the next cycle can actually use.

Goal

re0-memo extracts durable learning from a work cycle without defending the artifact that produced it. A cycle can run, pass tests, and still be the wrong thing. The output is not a changelog or therapy note: it is a local, evidence-backed record of what worked, what misled the build, and what gate the next pass must clear.

Use re0-memo when the artifact is done, failed, disappointing, or ambiguous enough that the next agent needs the cycle's lessons more than its momentum.

Workflow

1. Read the original objective, final artifact, QA evidence, user complaints, and any local planning notes.
2. Separate working assets from misleading progress: contracts, schemas, tests, services, vocabulary, and examples that earned reuse vs. UI, panels, scaffolds, or abstractions that only looked productive.
3. Generalize before recording: when feedback arrives as many specific complaints, cluster them upward into the shared pattern before writing anything down — many specifics against many items usually share one root gap. Record the root and its pattern family as the lesson; keep the specifics under it as evidence, not as lessons themselves.
4. Name each failure as an anti-pattern, not a mood.
5. Convert repeated or high-impact failures into quality gates for the next pass.
6. Convert vague user direction into architecture vocabulary a fresh agent can use.
7. Write or refresh local docs for the cycle: a re0-memo for lessons and a plan for next-cycle contracts, gates, and vocabulary.
8. Verify that a from-scratch agent could avoid the same failure from those docs alone.

Rules

• Do not defend the artifact. If it missed the product, say what missed.
• Do not write a changelog. File lists and effort summaries are not lessons.
• Do not transcribe a specific complaint as a lesson. A lesson that only fixes the reported case keeps the system human-in-the-loop: the same class of failure returns anywhere a person didn't point. Escalate every specific to the pattern that catches its whole class — the reporter's exact words are evidence, not the gate.
• Preserve negative corpus. Failed paths are training data.
• Prefer hard gates over advice.
• Cite evidence from the cycle: objective, file facts, QA output, screenshots, transcripts, diffs, or user feedback.
• If the next agent cannot act on it, it is not a lesson yet.
• Keep provenance local; shipped artifacts should not narrate their scars.

Verification

Before finishing:

1. Every lesson traces to observed cycle evidence.
2. Every anti-pattern names a concrete failure mode and the gate that catches it.
3. No lesson is a single reported case in disguise: each covers a class, with the specifics that raised it sitting under it as evidence.
4. A fresh agent can tell what to preserve, what to discard, and what to test first without reading the whole old session.