Close

/close — session close ritual

trialerror session close REFUSES (never silently skips a step) on any of:

1. Dangling launches. Reconcile every launch you booked this session first:

   trialerror budget reconcile --launch-id <id> --actual-tokens <n>
   

2. Unread inbox items (the close checklist). Read them:

   trialerror inbox read
   

3. A stale law pin. If a ruling was appended since this session booted, close refuses. Investigate before proceeding — do not paper over it:

   trialerror law diff-foreign --pin <your boot_pin_version>
   

4. Hooks never armed (zero hook_alive events recorded this session). This is override-only — do not manufacture a ruling to get past it; get a real one from the user first:

   trialerror session close ... --override-ruling-id C-####
   

Once the above are clear, close with a REQUIRED course-check object (the origin-project convention: rungs climbed, build-vs-theory split, a drift flag) as JSON:

trialerror session close --course-check '{"rungs": "...", "build_vs_theory": "...", "drift_flag": false}' --notes "one-line summary"

On success the result names the newly-rendered handoff file (under handoffs/) and confirms the previous one now carries a supersession notice — never hand-edit either file; both are rendered views over the session row in ops.db. If the handoff file is ever lost or corrupted without the session row changing, trialerror session render-handoff --session-id <id> re-flushes it from ops.db truth without bumping to a new suffix.

If a session crashed instead of closing cleanly (the Stop hook or a future boot reports it), close is not the right tool — use trialerror session abandon --session-id <id> --reason "..." so the next trialerror session boot is not blocked by a session nobody will ever close.

Capture lessons before closing: the l0_abstract authoring rule (wikiskill-F6)

Close is when a session's lessons, rules, facts and preferences are written to memory (trialerror memory put). Boot and memory search return l0_abstract lines and never bodies, so the abstract is the only thing that decides whether an item is ever read again — an abstract that is a topic label ("notes on reconciliation") is a line nobody expands. Every l0_abstract therefore states three things, in one or two sentences:

PROBLEM — what went wrong, or what question kept recurring. ROOT CAUSE — why; the cause, not the symptom. FIX — the exact action or command that resolves it.

trialerror memory put --key close.reconcile-before-close --tier L0 --kind lesson \
  --account <account-id> \
  --l0-abstract "PROBLEM: close refused on a dangling launch whose subagent had long since returned. ROOT CAUSE: post_task only FLAGS a RUNNING launch for reconciliation; nothing reconciles it. FIX: run 'trialerror budget reconcile --launch-id <id> --actual-tokens <n>' for every RUNNING row before 'session close'." \
  --body "<the full lesson: exact command sequence as run, when it applies, when it does not>"

Body rules (the sibling pattern-page rules from the same source): root cause, not symptom; exact command sequences copied from the run, not paraphrased; update the existing item rather than adding a near-duplicate — put upserts by (key, account), so reuse the key; 10-30 lines. An abstract that is only a label, or a body that is only a symptom, is an item to rewrite before close, not to accept. Nothing enforces this in code yet (put takes any string), so it is a review rule: read your own abstracts back once before closing.

Source: WikiSkill (arXiv:2608.27454, CC BY 4.0) §E.2 — index entries "are the MOST IMPORTANT part of the wiki ... they determine whether inference agents will read the full pattern pages", each stating PROBLEM + ROOT CAUSE + FIX. Two code follow-ups are tracked separately and will surface, never rewrite, items: save-time conflict candidates (advisory only) and age-based needs_review surfacing as a doctor check.

When NOT to apply

• To get past a refusal. Dangling launches, a stale pin and an unread inbox are the cause to fix; --override-ruling-id is for a real ruling from the user, never a manufactured one.
• The session crashed — trialerror session abandon is the tool, not close.
• To hand-edit a handoff. Both handoff files are rendered views over the session row; render-handoff re-flushes them.
• As a mid-session checkpoint. The course-check is an end-of-session object; mid-session notes go to events or the feed.