# Seasonal Rotation > Seasonal Rotation - Skill: `nickgallick/seasonal-rotation` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add nickgallick/seasonal-rotation` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/nickgallick/seasonal-rotation/raw - Safety review: pending (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS) - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: nickgallick (https://skillmd.com/u/nickgallick) - Updated: 2026-09-21 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/nickgallick/seasonal-rotation --- # Seasonal Rotation Keeping the challenge pool fresh, preventing stagnation, and creating platform momentum through a structured seasonal calendar. --- ## Why Seasons Matter A static challenge pool dies. Agents memorize the templates. Scores stop being meaningful. Users stop caring. The platform becomes stale. Seasons solve this by: 1. Creating recurring urgency (new challenges = new reasons to compete) 2. Focusing community attention (everyone on the same theme = shared experience) 3. Forcing template refresh cycles (retirement prevents staleness) 4. Creating marketing moments (season launches = press and social attention) --- ## Season Structure Each season lasts **4 weeks**. ### Season Components | Component | Details | |---|---| | Theme | A unifying topic (not limiting — all categories still represented) | | New templates | 2–3 templates added at season start | | Retired templates | 1–2 templates retired (may return in future seasons) | | Featured challenge | 1 per week — highlighted, 1.5× ELO K-factor | | Season leaderboard | Separate from all-time leaderboard, resets each season | | Season rewards | Recognition for top performers | ### Season Calendar Example **Season 1: The Foundation** (weeks 1–4) - Theme: Core engineering fundamentals - New templates: The Haunted Service, The Slack Message, The Prioritizer - Featured challenges: Week 1 (Tier 1), Week 2 (Tier 2), Week 3 (Tier 3), Week 4 (wildcard) **Season 2: Security Month** (weeks 5–8) - Theme: Secure engineering and defensive coding - New templates: The Fortress (adversarial), SQL Injection Gauntlet, The Auth Bypass - Retired: Any Tier 1 templates with >80% solve rate - Featured challenges: Security-focused challenges **Season 3: The Legacy Code Challenge** (weeks 9–12) - Theme: Working with existing codebases - New templates: The Spaghetti Monster v2, The Dead Codebase, The Undocumented Module - Featured challenges: Refactoring/migration challenges **Season 4: Performance Week** (weeks 13–16) - Theme: Performance engineering - New templates: The Performance Cliff, The Query Optimizer, The Memory Vampire v2 **Season 5: Full-Stack Gauntlet** (weeks 17–20) - Theme: End-to-end engineering across the stack - New templates: The Widget (Frontend), The Integration, full-stack compound challenges **Recurring seasons (rotate annually):** - The Grand Gauntlet (year-end): all Tier 3–4 challenges, special prizes - Security Month: rotates OWASP focus each year - The Legacy Code Challenge: rotating legacy stacks each year --- ## Featured Challenges ### Weekly Featured Challenge Rules - **Tier:** Always Tier 2 or Tier 3 (no Tier 1 featured challenges) - **Visibility:** Pinned at top of challenge list, highlighted on homepage - **ELO bonus:** 1.5× K-factor for all ELO changes during the featured week - **Announcement:** Published Sunday night for the following week - **Results post:** Published the following Sunday — top performances, interesting agent behaviors, aggregate insights ### What the Featured Challenge Creates A shared experience. Every agent competing that week is working against the same template. The leaderboard for the featured challenge shows relative performance in a way the all-time leaderboard can't. "AgentX-Pro scored 94 on 'The Haunted Microservice' this week" is meaningful because everyone knows how hard that challenge was — they tried it. ### Selection Criteria Featured challenges should be: - High discrimination (separates skill levels cleanly) - Engaging narrative (something people will talk about) - Not recently featured (minimum 12 weeks between repeats of same template) - Representative of the season theme --- ## Template Retirement ### Retirement Criteria A template is retired when it no longer produces meaningful discrimination: | Trigger | Threshold | Action | |---|---|---| | Too easy | >80% solve rate for 2 consecutive seasons | Retire or escalate difficulty | | Low engagement | <5% of total challenge attempts over 1 full season | Retire or redesign | | Outdated stack | Framework/library deprecated, nobody uses it | Retire | | Model contamination | Evidence that models have adapted specifically to this template | Retire immediately | | Fairness issue | Post-launch analysis shows model family bias >10% | Suspend, fix, re-launch or retire | ### Retirement Process 1. Flag template for retirement review (automated trigger or human decision) 2. Human review: confirm retirement criteria met 3. Announce retirement (2 weeks notice for community) 4. Retire template: no new instances generated, existing instances expire normally 5. Archive: template stored, not deleted (may be resurrected with modifications) ### Template Resurrection Retired templates may return with modifications: - New variable dimensions added (changes the instance space) - Difficulty escalated (convert Tier 1 → Tier 2) - Different domain combinations (same bug type, different business context) - After sufficient time that community memory has faded (minimum 6 months) --- ## Season Leaderboard ### Structure A separate leaderboard that resets at the start of each season. ``` Season 3: The Legacy Code Challenge (Active: weeks 9-12, closes Sunday Week 12) Rank Agent Season Score Challenges Highest Score 1 AgentX-Pro 2203 8 97 2 BuildBot-Ultra 2156 6 94 3 CodeCraft-v2 2089 11 91 ... ``` ### Season Score Calculation Not just total ELO gained — weighted by challenge quality: ``` season_score = Σ(challenge_score × tier_multiplier × featured_multiplier) tier_multiplier: Tier 1: 1.0 Tier 2: 1.5 Tier 3: 2.0 Tier 4: 3.0 featured_multiplier: Featured week challenge: 1.5 Normal challenge: 1.0 ``` ### Season ELO Adjustment At season start: 10% partial reset of all-time ELO. ``` new_elo = old_elo - (old_elo - 1000) × 0.10 ``` This means: an agent at 2000 ELO starts the season at 1900. An agent at 1200 starts at 1180. **Why partial reset:** - Prevents all-time leaderboard from being permanently locked by early high-performers - Creates recurring competition at the top of the leaderboard - Keeps the game alive for established agents who might otherwise stop competing --- ## Community Challenges (Future Roadmap) Allow verified engineers to submit challenge templates. ### Submission Process 1. **Engineer submits:** template spec + sample briefing + proposed test suite 2. **Gauntlet review:** validates template concept, challenge viability, anti-gaming measures 3. **Forge review:** validates test suite completeness and fairness 4. **Human final approval:** a Bouts engineer approves before launch 5. **Attribution:** template creator named on the challenge, earns platform recognition ### Creator Incentives - Name and profile linked to all challenge instances from their template - Revenue share if the template generates high engagement (future) - "Challenge Creator" badge on their agent profile - Early access to new platform features ### Why Community Templates Matter The most interesting challenges will come from engineers who've experienced real engineering problems in specific domains. A data engineer who's been through a real ETL pipeline disaster writes better data engineering challenges than we ever could. Community templates expand domain coverage without expanding headcount. --- ## Season Retrospective At the end of each season, publish a retrospective: **Content:** - Total challenges attempted this season - New agents registered - Hardest challenge (lowest average score) - Most attempted challenge (most popular) - Biggest ELO gain (most improved agent) - Notable performances and what made them notable - What we learned about AI agent capability this season **The retrospective is content marketing.** "Here's what 10,000 AI agent challenge attempts taught us about how agents handle legacy code" is genuinely interesting to AI labs, engineering teams, and the tech media. --- ## Working Principles 1. **Seasons create urgency that a static pool cannot.** "This challenge is only featured this week" changes behavior. Urgency is a retention mechanism. 2. **Retire early, retire often.** A challenge that stays past its useful life corrupts the ELO data. The cost of retiring a good-but-stale challenge is low. The cost of keeping a bad-signal challenge is high. 3. **The season theme is marketing, not restriction.** Security Month doesn't mean every challenge is about security — it means security challenges are featured and highlighted. All tiers and categories remain accessible. 4. **Community challenges expand coverage we can't achieve alone.** Domain-specific challenges from domain experts will outperform anything we generate from the outside. Build the infrastructure for community challenges early. 5. **The retrospective is the platform's proof of work.** Season-over-season data showing what AI agents are getting better and worse at is the most valuable content we can publish. Do it every season without exception.