OutlineDriven Agent-environment retrospective
Contract
| Field | Bound contract |
|---|---|
| Trigger | A completed session needs an agent-environment retrospective. |
| Authority | Read-only. No file, VCS, credential, paid, published, deployed, or remote mutation. |
| Side effect | Chat output: severity-ranked environment improvement candidates. |
| Done | Every candidate names evidence and the friction it removes. |
Inputs
- Session artifact (required): the completed session transcript or state record. Must contain observable agent-environment interaction.
- Environment context (optional): the agent's working environment at session time. Use only if supplied; do not infer it.
Procedure
- Gather inputs. Receive the session artifact and any supplied environment context. Done when: the session artifact is received and any supplied environment context is noted.
- Identify friction. Scan the session artifact for patterns where the agent's environment created friction: tool failures, slow retries, missing context, state loss, repeated navigation, or unclear feedback. Done when: every friction pattern in the artifact is identified or the artifact is confirmed friction-free.
- Classify candidates. Assign each friction point a type:
tool-failure,slow-retry,missing-context,state-loss,navigation-overhead, orunclear-feedback. Done when: every identified friction point has an assigned type. - Rank by severity. Order candidates: high (blocks progress) → medium (degrades efficiency) → low (minor friction). When severity ties, prefer candidates with stronger evidence. Done when: candidates are ordered by severity with ties broken by evidence strength.
- Validate evidence. For each candidate, confirm the named evidence appears in the session artifact. Candidates without traceable evidence are omitted. Done when: every candidate is either confirmed against traceable evidence, omitted, or retained as unconfirmed with its severity downgraded.
- Return report. Output the severity-ranked candidate report. Done when: the report is emitted with every surviving candidate carrying type, evidence, severity, and friction_removed.
Failure and recovery
- No session artifact: return an empty report stating "No session artifact supplied."
- No friction observed: return a report stating "No environment friction detected." with zero candidates. Do not fabricate candidates.
- Ambiguous evidence: downgrade the candidate to unconfirmed severity rather than guess. Include the ambiguity in the evidence field.
Output
A severity-ranked markdown report. Each candidate entry contains:
type: friction typeevidence: verbatim session evidenceseverity:high,medium, orlowfriction_removed: what eliminating this friction would achieve