Retrospective Process

Retrospective Process

Guide for analyzing development sessions to extract learnings, identify patterns, and improve future work through structured reflection.

Purpose

Retrospectives transform implicit session knowledge into explicit, reusable rules and knowledge entries. Extract value from:

• Mistakes made and their root causes
• Good decisions and why they worked
• Patterns discovered during implementation
• Debugging insights worth preserving
• Architectural decisions and rationale

Analysis Framework

Depth Levels

Analysis Categories

Analyze session events across five categories:

1. Mistakes (M)

• What went wrong?
• Root cause (not just symptom)
• Prevention strategy
• Rule candidate: YES/NO

2. Good Decisions (G)

• What worked well?
• Why it succeeded
• Pattern to replicate
• KG entry candidate: YES/NO

3. Patterns (P)

• Recurring code patterns
• Workflow patterns
• Tool usage patterns
• Worth codifying: YES/NO

4. Debugging Insights (D)

• Error resolution strategies
• Investigation techniques
• Tool combinations that worked
• Worth documenting: YES/NO

5. Architectural Decisions (A)

• Design choices made
• Trade-offs considered
• Rationale
• Add to decision log: YES/NO

Session Analysis Process

Step 1: Scan Session

Scan conversation for significant events:

Identify:
- Error messages and their resolutions
- Multiple attempts at same task
- Tool failures and recoveries
- User corrections or clarifications
- Successful implementations
- Refactoring or rework

Step 2: Categorize Events

For each significant event, assign category (M/G/P/D/A) and assess:

Event: [Brief description]
Category: [M/G/P/D/A]
Impact: [High/Medium/Low]
Actionable: [Yes/No]

Step 3: Extract Learnings

Transform events into structured learnings:

## Learning: [Title]

**Category**: [M/G/P/D/A]
**Context**: [When this applies]
**Learning**: [What was learned]
**Action**: [Rule to add | KG entry | No action]

Step 4: Generate Outputs

For each actionable learning:

If Rule candidate:

• Use concise-rule-writing skill for formatting
• Determine placement (CLAUDE.md vs .claude/rules/)
• Draft rule text (<50 words)

If KG entry candidate:

• Determine entry type (decision, pattern, convention)
• Draft entry content
• Identify related entries

Output Format

Present findings grouped by action type:

## Retrospective Results

### Session Summary
- Duration: [X messages/events analyzed]
- Key events: [Count by category]

### Rules to Add
| Rule | Placement | Rationale |
|------|-----------|-----------|
| [rule text] | [CLAUDE.md/.claude/rules/X.md] | [why] |

### Rules to Update
| Current | Proposed | File |
|---------|----------|------|
| [old] | [new] | [path] |

### Knowledge Graph Entries
| Type | Content | Tags |
|------|---------|------|
| [decision/pattern/convention] | [text] | [tags] |

### Skipped Items
- [Item] - [Reason: too specific/already covered/low impact]

Quality Criteria

Evaluate each proposed change:

Include if:

• Applies to future sessions (not one-off)
• Prevents real problems (not theoretical)
• Can be stated in <50 words (concise)
• Not already covered by existing rules

Exclude if:

• Too specific to this task
• Already captured elsewhere
• Low probability of recurrence
• Would clutter rule set

Integration Points

With Knowledge Graph

Store retrospective results in KG:

# Add decision
/coconut-knowledge-graph:add "decision-name" --type decision --content "[text]"

# Add pattern
/coconut-knowledge-graph:add "pattern-name" --type convention --content "[text]"

With Rules System

Create rules via:

# Add to rules
/coconut-rules:add-rule "[rule text]"

History Tracking

Save retrospective summary to .claude/retrospectives/YYYY-MM-DD.md:

# Retrospective: [Date]

## Session Focus
[What was worked on]

## Key Learnings
[Bullet points]

## Changes Made
- Rules: [list]
- KG entries: [list]

## Notes
[Additional context]

Common Patterns

Mistake → Rule Pipeline

Mistake detected
↓
Identify root cause (not symptom)
↓
Determine if preventable by rule
↓
Draft rule (<50 words)
↓
Place: Security/critical → CLAUDE.md
       Domain-specific → .claude/rules/[domain].md

Decision → KG Pipeline

Decision made during session
↓
Document alternatives considered
↓
Record rationale
↓
Tag with relevant contexts
↓
Add to knowledge graph

Commands Reference

Best Practices

• Run retrospective at natural breakpoints, not mid-task
• Focus on actionable learnings, skip theoretical improvements
• Prefer updating existing rules over creating new ones
• Keep rules concise - use concise-rule-writing skill
• Cross-reference related rules and KG entries
• Delete retrospective history older than 30 days unless significant