Mace-Enterprise retro — team-coached retrospective
The continuous-improvement ritual. It does NOT make the model smarter; it improves
the context the team runs with next time (skills, guardrails, role briefs,
routing) — and only via durable artifacts that get retrieved at the right
moment. Canonical mechanics: wiki experience/methodology/team-coached-retrospective-loop.
The outcome-log (the signal — feed it continuously)
The loop is worthless without a signal. During normal work, append one line to the
project's outcome-log (<repo>/.memory/outcome-log.md, or the wiki's
Wiki/journal/outcome-log.md for wiki work) whenever something is worth learning:
<date> · <type> · <one line: what happened> → <delta or "none">
Entry types: outcome (verify green/red), review-catch (a reviewer/peer caught
an error before it landed), provenance/redaction (a sourcing/secret slip),
user-correction (a behavior the user criticized — verbatim gist). User
corrections are first-class: capture them the moment they happen, not just at /retro.
The ritual (when /retro is invoked)
- Read the signal — the recent outcome-log entries + the relevant diffs/commits.
- Enact role-coach (advisory; tools: Read/Grep/Glob). For each recurring or
high-cost entry, propose a concrete delta — never "be more careful":
- a process gate (a check added to a skill/workflow),
- a skill edit (hand to skill-smith),
- a guardrail (a rule that prevents the mistake class),
- a role-brief change, or a team-composition tweak for next time.
- Independent voice — have the Codex peer (read-only) review the proposed
deltas (cross-model, so it isn't self-grading). See
codex-as-role/peer-review. - Owner gate — present the deltas; the owner approves before anything lands. No autonomous self-rewrite of rules.
- Land + probation-track — the librarian writes the approved deltas into the
wiki/skills and adds a probation note: the delta is provisional until a later run
confirms it reduced its target error class (see
skill-and-agent-probation-lifecycle); otherwise revert. Record the result back in the outcome-log.
Guardrails for the ritual itself
- Concrete or nothing — a delta must be a testable change to an artifact, not advice.
- Retrieval, not prompt-bloat — learnings live in recall-indexed pages, not the always-on prompt.
- One incident ≠ a law — mark a new rule provisional; confirm over repeats.
- Independent review — never let the same agent both do the work and grade it.
- Stay on the primary thread — the retro serves the work; don't let it become a rabbit hole.