# Session Trace Mining > Mine AI coding-agent session transcripts into structured, gate-validated GPU-kernel optimization records for the wiki. Use when asked to turn vibe-coding sessions, Codex rollout logs, or Claude Code project transcripts into wiki records; to summarise what a kernel-optimization session achieved; to build or extend a session-trace store; or to re-run and validate one. Also use when asked how a session-derived record's number, snippet, or provenance was established. - Skill: `alibaba/session-trace-mining` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 22 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add alibaba/session-trace-mining` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/alibaba/session-trace-mining/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: AI & ML - Author: alibaba (https://skillmd.com/u/alibaba) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/alibaba/session-trace-mining --- # Session Trace Mining ## Overview Turns session transcripts into `session-trace-1.0` records: one record per change that measurably moved a metric, answering which operator, what was wrong, what changed, why it worked at the machine level, the verbatim code, and the gain. The pipeline splits three ways: **scripts do deterministic extraction, an agent does semantic distillation, and sixteen mechanical gates catch fabrication.** The gates are why the output can be trusted. A model filling fields is the weak link, so nothing enters the store that cannot be checked against the transcript. What makes a transcript corpus different from a repository of commits: **there is no repository to check a citation against.** The transcript *is* the corpus. So provenance is a set name plus a set-relative path plus a per-line digest, and every number must trace to a span the packet carried — with the agent's own prose deliberately excluded from that span set. ## Why every part of it lives here The same shape of problem — extract deterministically, distil semantically, gate mechanically — applies to any corpus of optimisation history. What travels between such pipelines is **design**, not code: the three-way split, the declarative `make_schema.py` patch list, the packet contract, and the discipline of writing down every pitfall with the number behind it. **Nothing is imported.** This skill is self-contained, deliberately: | concern | here | why not shared | |---|---|---| | operator naming, workload families | `families.py` | the layout gate derives a record's directory from these functions, so a change in another tree would silently refile records | | milestone selection (the ratchet) | `ladder.py` | its thresholds decide this store's record set; and an A/B corpus with no ladder pushes back on rules that have no business knowing about it | | ranking model | `score.py` | a re-ranked store with no diff to show for it is the worst kind of drift | Each of the three pins its own behaviour with a `self_test()` that runs standalone (`python3 families.py`, `python3 score.py`). `score.py` reproduces the curve published by the shared ranking model in `tools/wiki_score.py` for the inputs this corpus produces — 4% → 0.35, 20% → 0.66, 99% → 1.0, and the 0.35 feedback band — so scores stay comparable with the committed store **by verification rather than by coupling**. If the shared model changes, that self-test is where the divergence surfaces. The only paths outside the skill are the two *data* locations declared in `config.py`: where the product goes (`kernel_wiki/session_trace//`) and the dedup / overlap scan over `kernel_wiki/records`. No logic crosses the boundary. ## Setup One thing has to be configured, because no transcripts ship with this repository: 1. point `STM_ROOT` at the directory holding your own transcript archive; 2. register your sets in `scripts/config.py` `SETS`, replacing the single `example-set` placeholder entry. A set is named, never passed as a path, so a record's provenance survives moving the archive. Both output locations are derived and need no configuration: - **scratch** — `/tmp/session-trace-mining//`: parsed candidates, segments, packets. Reproducible, never committed. Override with `STM_WORKSPACE`. - **product** — `/kernel_wiki/session_trace//`: records and the reports that justify them. Override with `STM_STORE`. It sits beside the committed store but **not** inside `kernel_wiki/records/`: these records use the derived `session-trace-1.0` schema, so filing them into the committed store would make that store fail its own schema gate. Promoting one means rewriting it against `schema/kernel/schema.json`, deliberately and one at a time. Plain `python3` is enough. The `schema` gate additionally needs `jsonschema`; without it that one gate reports SKIP and the other fifteen still run. ## Pipeline ```bash S=/scripts export STM_ROOT=/path/to/your/transcript-archive export STM_SET=example-set # a key of config.SETS -- register your own python3 $S/make_schema.py --check # schema matches its patch list python3 $S/ingest.py # transcripts -> work/versions.jsonl python3 $S/recon.py # -> reports/recon.md READ THIS FIRST python3 $S/partition.py # -> work/segments.jsonl, reports/partition.md python3 $S/build_packets.py # -> packets/.{json,diff} # distil (see below), then: python3 $S/validate_store.py --verbose # sixteen gates python3 $S/validate_store.py --injection-tests python3 $S/score_records.py # worth.rank.score + records/index.json python3 $S/make_readme.py # -> kernel_wiki/session_trace//README.md ``` Re-run the last two after every distillation batch. **Read `reports/recon.md` before distilling.** It decides what the product can honestly be: the citable-number share, the diff-coverage share, and how much the committed store already covers. If a set turns out to have almost no numbers, its value is mechanism and anti-patterns — do not force a gain claim onto every record. ## Two candidate units The unit is a property of the corpus, not a preference, and it is declared per set in `config.SETS`. Getting it wrong yields either nothing or nonsense, so it was settled by a probe before any schema existed (see `references/lessons.md` §1–2). | unit | when | what one record is | |---|---|---| | `version-ladder` | the run keeps a numbered ladder (`memory/vN.json` + `vN:` commit subjects) | one version, assembled **across the whole set** — one session is one version, so the ladder does not exist inside a single file | | `ab-comparison` | no ladder | one measured A/B: a variant comparison printed complete in one output, or the same benchmark run either side of an edit | ## Evidence tiers The single most important design decision. Every span carries a tier, and only three of five may be cited: | tier | content | citable | caps `gain.basis` at | |---|---|---|---| | T1 | benchmark / profiler stdout | yes | `measured` | | T2 | the agent reading back its own notes (`cat NOTES.md`, `git log`, `Read memory/vN.json`) | yes | `reported` | | T3 | an agent-authored structured field | yes | `reported` | | T4 | agent prose and thinking | **no** | — | | T5 | the orchestrator prompt | **no** | — | T4 is excluded because admitting it makes the fabrication gate vacuous: the agent's invented number becomes its own proof. T5 is excluded because those prompts state the target percentage, which would license any number near it. ## The sixteen gates `schema` · `ids` · `layout` · `provenance` · `verbatim` · `no-fabrication` · `direction` · `raw-isolation` · `relations` · `index` · `evidence-tier` · `diff-coverage` · `unit-normalization` · `wiki-overlap` · `pairing-integrity` · `anonymization` The six that carry the weight: - **provenance** — re-resolves the set by name, the file by set-relative path, and every cited line by `sha256(raw line)[:12]`. Retargeting a citation fails; moving the whole archive to another absolute path still passes. A cited line with *no* digest is a failure too — without that clause the check silently does nothing, which is what the line-shift injection caught. - **verbatim** — `implementation.snippet` must appear literally in `packets/.diff`. The gate and the distiller read the same file on purpose. - **no-fabrication** — every number in `worth.gain` must be in the packet's `evidence_text`, or derivable from it by one of exactly two closed-form rules (before/after, or `speedup=Nx`). Derivation from arbitrary *pairs* of pool numbers is deliberately not allowed. - **unit-normalization** — the delta must be reproducible from the measured levels, and no absolute time may appear inside `worth.gain`. - **wiki-overlap** — nothing the committed store already covers: a colliding `(operator, version)` dedup key, a record id, or an `episode_key`. It scans `kernel_wiki/records`, and **an empty scan is a failure, not a pass** — an overlap gate whose index resolved to nothing would print OK forever. - **anonymization** — the served layers must name no person, host or corpus path. Session transcripts are full of `/home//...`, and `payload` is what gets served. The record `id` is checked separately, because a home path flattened into a slug has no slash left for the path pattern to catch. **Never weaken a gate to make records pass, and never let a distilling agent edit `scripts/`.** When a gate looks wrong, verify by injection: `validate_store.py --injection-tests` mutates a record (and, where the error lives there, its packet) and asserts that the named gate complains. Adding a gate without an injection test is how a store ends up falsely green — two of the eleven cases here were asleep on their first run. ## Distillation Spawn agents with `references/distill-brief.md` **verbatim**, substituting the placeholders. Batch by set and record type so a failure has a small blast radius, and point every agent at the one record that already passes as the worked example. Require each agent to run `validate_store.py` itself and iterate to green, and to report **which fields the packet was too thin to fill** and **which gate blocked it**. That report is the main signal for improving the pipeline; treat a batch that reports no difficulties with suspicion. When several agents write into one store concurrently, tell them explicitly to ignore gate failures naming records they do not own. ## Porting to another corpus Everything is corpus-agnostic except two places: - **`scripts/config.py` `SETS`** — register the set: its path under the archive root, its transcript format, its candidate unit, and default scope. Defaults are fallbacks only; `ingest.py` detects hardware and DSL and records which happened in `arch_basis` / `dsl_basis`. - **`scripts/transcripts.py`** — the only file that knows how a session log is shaped. A third agent product means one new `parse_*` function returning the same `Event` stream, plus a branch in `detect_format`. Everything downstream sees events and never a raw line. Two corpus-specific details that will need attention on a new corpus: how a long-running benchmark's output is linked back to the command that launched it (in Codex logs it is a `SESSION_ID=N` handshake), and which label words name a whole implementation rather than a knob (`partition.IMPL_LABEL_RE`). **Decide the unit before writing any schema.** It is what ids, pairing, `dedup_key` and the whole `worth.gain` ladder key on, so getting it wrong means re-doing the schema, the packets and three gates. Three probes exist for exactly that decision and should be re-run on a new corpus: ```bash python3 $S/probe_versions.py [...] # per file: versions, edits, metrics, pairing python3 $S/probe_set.py # does the ladder exist across the set? python3 $S/probe_ab.py # if not, how many measured A/Bs are there? ``` `probe_versions.py` answers "can I see versions in one file"; `probe_set.py` answers the question that actually matters for a ladder, since one session is one version; `probe_ab.py` sizes the fallback. Write the pass bars down before running them, and if a corpus fails its bar, change the unit rather than the bar. ## Resources - `references/lessons.md` — **read before starting.** Every pitfall found while building this, with the measured numbers behind each: why one session is one version, why the codex sets cannot be paired before/after, the `s`-for-seconds trap, the table column that inherited a unit it did not have, and the two gates that were asleep. - `references/distill-brief.md` — the agent brief template. - `assets/schema/session-trace-1.0.schema.json` — the record schema, generated by `make_schema.py` from `clean-1.3.frozen.json`, which is a pinned byte copy of this repository's `schema/kernel/schema.json`.