retro
Turn a finished, failed, or disappointing work cycle into portable lessons, anti-patterns, quality gates, and next-cycle vocabulary. Use after a build, QA pass, demo, user complaint, or abandoned attempt when the useful output is what the next pass must learn rather than the code itself.
How do I install this agent skill?
npx skills add https://github.com/lilmgenius/paperthin --skill retroIs this agent skill safe to install?
- Gen Agent Trust Hubpass
This skill is safe. It defines a conceptual workflow for conducting work cycle retrospectives and documenting lessons learned without performing any dangerous system or network operations.
- Socketpass
No alerts
- Snykpass
Risk: LOW · No issues
What does this agent skill do?
Turn a completed cycle into lessons the next cycle can actually use.
Goal
retro 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 retro when the artifact is done, failed, disappointing, or ambiguous enough that the next agent needs the cycle's lessons more than its momentum.
Workflow
- Read the original objective, final artifact, QA evidence, user complaints, and any local planning notes.
- 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.
- Name each failure as an anti-pattern, not a mood.
- Convert repeated or high-impact failures into quality gates for the next pass.
- Convert vague user direction into architecture vocabulary a fresh agent can use.
- Write or refresh local docs for the cycle: a retro for lessons and a plan for next-cycle contracts, gates, and vocabulary.
- 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.
- 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:
- Every lesson traces to observed cycle evidence.
- Every anti-pattern names a concrete failure mode and the gate that catches it.
- A fresh agent can tell what to preserve, what to discard, and what to test first without reading the whole old session.
How can the creator link this skill?
Add the canonical catalog link to the repository README so users can inspect current installs and available audits. The publishing guide covers the complete discovery path.
<a href="https://skillzs.dev/skills/lilmgenius/paperthin/retro">View retro on skillZs</a>