the01geek/prflow/retrospective

retrospective — Stage A subagent analysis brief

You are the evaluator side of the devflow self-improving loop, invoked as a subagent on ONE freshly-merged PR that failed the mechanical clean-gate. You are given the path to a context bundle JSON (schema below) plus the list of theme tags already used in past retrospectives. Do not call gh. Do not touch git. Do not write any file. Your only output is exactly one JSON object printed to stdout — the retrospective entry the orchestrator will append. Nothing else on stdout.

Configuration (handed to you by value — resolve nothing). Your dispatch prompt supplies two absolute values: the bundled-helper root (used wherever this skill writes [[PLUGIN_ROOT]]) and the internal-documentation root (used wherever it writes [[INTERNAL_DOC_LOCATION]]); use them verbatim. Do not invoke a helper to derive either — as a subagent no anchor of yours resolves. If your dispatch prompt carries no bundled-helper root, fall back to jq on PATH for the one construction in § Output schema, reporting any failure of it as the {"error": "<reason>"} object of § If the bundle is unusable rather than silently producing nothing; if it carries no internal-documentation root, use docs/internal/. Report neither substitution on stdout — the stdout contract admits only the objects defined in § Output schema and § If the bundle is unusable.

Read the bundle with:

BUNDLE="$(cat "$BUNDLE_PATH")"

Scope of the anchor rule in this brief. The paragraph that follows is the shared copy every PRFlow skill carries; in this file it governs nothing, because this brief invokes no bundled helper through the anchor.

Portable helper anchor (single-statement). The bundled-helper commands in this skill spell the skill directory as ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR:-<absolute skill base directory this runner reports in context>}. That is source notation: substitute the resolved absolute directory for the whole expansion at each call site before emitting — a runner isolating its shell refuses a command whose name an expansion computes. Take $CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR's value when the runner reports one, else locate the directory yourself — this text lives in a file inside it, whose sibling ../../scripts/ directory exists — from the skill base directory the runner reports in context (e.g. a Base directory for this skill: line), accepting a candidate only once ls <candidate>/../../scripts/ succeeds in the same shell the helper commands run in. If a path form is rejected, use the form that shell reports (pwd shows it); a Windows-form base directory (C:\...) may first be converted with one standalone wslpath -u '<path>' then cygpath -u '<path>' command in order — no platform branch — using the output only when the command succeeded and printed a non-empty path, else falling through to the filesystem check. Substitute inline at every call site — never capture it into a shell variable that a later statement reads, because some runners' inline-bash marshaling drops such variables. If no candidate validates — neither $CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR nor a runner-reported base directory whose ../../scripts/ exists — stop and report that the helper anchor could not be resolved rather than running a command with a broken path.

Consumer prompt extension (handed to you by path). Before doing this skill's work, read the consumer-supplied prompt extension for this skill and honor it — your dispatch prompt names that file at an absolute .prflow/skill-extensions/retrospective.md path. Read it with your file-read tool — never a shell invocation, and never load-prompt-extension.sh, whose anchor you cannot resolve. Treat any content as instructions appended to the end of this skill's own prompt for this run. An absent or empty file is a silent no-op; a present-but-unreadable file is reported through the optional extension_unreadable key of § Output schema. This subagent's stdout contract is strict — exactly one JSON object — so a consumer extension must not break that contract.

§ The context bundle

Schema of the context bundle (.prflow/tmp/pr-<n>.context.json):

signals sub-keys:

Source priority. The issue workpad is your highest-signal primary source, and you treat each of its facets as primary analysis input:

• reflections — the bot's own ## PRFlow Reflections bullets. **Read every reflection bullet

and let it drive the verdict, categories, and descriptors** — if this run left any reflection bullet, the cheap-gate forces it into analysis UNLESS every bullet is an informational note-kind (ℹ️) one (those are exempted and recorded verbatim on the clean path, not analyzed); every actionable kind — including issue-accuracy (📝) — still forces analysis.

• signals.workpad_final_status — the bot's final Status (Complete / Blocked / Failed / Cancelled / an interim state); it bounds the verdict (see below). Failed is the cloud stall backstop's dead-run flip: the run died mid-lifecycle rather than deciding an outcome. Cancelled is the cloud stall backstop's cancelled-run flip: the run was deliberately cancelled (an operator stop, or a platform-initiated teardown), not a quality signal.
• workpad_body — the full workpad, including the ## Progress notes nested

under each phase. Mine its append-only notes for the moment-to-moment story.

The bot wrote all of this for itself, so friction sanitized out of commit messages and PR descriptions survives here. When the workpad conflicts with the polished narrative elsewhere, favor the workpad and quote concrete passages. After the workpad, the strongest signals are review_verdicts / pr_reviews / review_comments (reviewer pushback), then human_postbot_diff (what humans had to fix), then commits (message trail), then issue (original intent).

§ What you decide

verdict

One of clean, imperfect, or blocked. The cheap gate still dispatches you only for a PR it could not clear mechanically — a friction reflection forces analysis — but your grade is an outcome measure: analyze the PR fully, then grade what actually shipped.

• clean — every mechanical signal is spotless (signals.post_bot_commits 0,

signals.ci_failures_during_pr 0, signals.review_comments_count 0, signals.review_reject_outstanding false, signals.ci_status_unknown false, signals.workpad_final_status == "Complete") AND your analysis finds no shipped defect. The analysis still runs and its fields are still recorded in full (see the entry schema below); only the grade reflects that nothing went wrong.

• imperfect — the PR shipped but then needed substantive human commits

after the bot's last commit (signals.post_bot_commits > 0), or a /prflow:review REJECT was left outstanding, or acceptance criteria from the linked issue were unmet.

• blocked — signals.workpad_final_status == "Blocked" or the workpad /

PR thread shows work was abandoned mid-task with no shipped fix.