Retrospective

Retrospective

Generate a technical journey document that captures the decisions, tradeoffs, and debugging moments from a coding session. The output reads like a developer's blog post — technically interesting, honest about mistakes, and educational.

Process

1. Gather context — Review the conversation history to identify: what was built, what decisions were made, what broke, what was debugged, and the final state. Note specific code patterns, error messages, and the reasoning chain behind each decision.

2. Determine audience — Ask the user if not obvious. Default to: technically curious developers who may be early-career. This means explaining why over what, and not assuming familiarity with niche tools.

3. Draft the retrospective — Follow the structure in structure.md. Write in first person. Be honest about what went wrong and why.

4. Revise after later fixes — Treat the retrospective as a living document during the session. If a later fix changes the root cause, implementation details, or tradeoffs, update the retrospective so it matches the final truth instead of leaving stale explanations in place.

5. Review for educational value — Before presenting, check each section against these criteria:

   • Would a junior developer understand why this decision was made, not just what was done?
   • Are there implicit assumptions that need to be made explicit?
   • Is the debugging narrative complete? (symptom → investigation → root cause → fix)
   • Does the writing assume knowledge that should be explained briefly?

6. Output — Write to docs/ in the project (or as specified). Use markdown.

Writing Guidelines

• First person, conversational tone. Not formal, not corporate.
• Show the messy parts. "I tried X, it broke because Y, so I did Z" is more valuable than "I implemented Z."
• Code snippets should be minimal and focused — show the interesting 5 lines, not the full file.
• Every technical choice needs a because. "I chose Turso because it's SQLite under the hood and my schema is trivial" > "I chose Turso."
• End sections with what you'd do differently or what comes next.
• Avoid jargon without context. First mention of a tool/concept gets a one-line explanation.
• If later work invalidates an earlier section, rewrite that section instead of leaving contradictory history behind.
• The closing should be memorable — a one-liner, a reflection, or a forward-looking thought. Not a summary.

References

• Document structure: See references/structure.md for the section template and examples of good/bad retrospectives.