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Retro

Matt PocockCommunityCreated by Matt Pocock

  • Skill
  • Review and audit
  • Software development
  • MIT
  • No issues found
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From the author

Conduct a retrospective on a coding session.
— the description by Matt Pocock

AutoGineer summary

Written by AutoGineer from the skill’s own files, not by the author

The retro skill provides a systematic framework for evaluating past coding sessions to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. By analyzing session logs and repository configurations, it helps users optimize their agent's environment, coding standards, and tool usage. The process emphasizes shifting responsibility for quality control to review agents and establishing automated guardrails to reduce context pressure on implementation agents.

What it does

  • Analyzes coding session logs to identify areas for process improvement.
  • Evaluates navigation efficiency and suggests pointers for better file discovery.
  • Audits existing automated checks and proposes new guardrails to catch errors.
  • Refines coding standards by distinguishing between mechanical rules and judgment calls.
  • Optimizes tool economy by identifying inefficient or redundant tool calls.
  • Streamlines steering files like AGENTS.md to reduce context bloat.

When to use it

  • After completing a complex coding task or project milestone.
  • When an agent repeatedly struggles with the same types of errors.
  • When a repository lacks automated linting, testing, or CI guardrails.
  • When coding sessions consistently take too long to navigate or find information.
  • When steering files have become too large or ineffective.

Advantages

  • Reduces future context pressure on implementation agents.
  • Promotes a shift toward automated, deterministic quality control.
  • Improves long-term developer productivity through environment optimization.
  • Ensures coding standards are enforced by the appropriate agent role.
  • Helps maintain clean and manageable configuration files.

Usage examples

“retro”
The agent analyzes the current session logs, identifies that a specific test suite was missed, and suggests adding a pre-commit hook to the repository.
“retro for the last session”
The agent reviews the previous session, notes that navigation was slow due to deep file nesting, and recommends adding navigation pointers to the project documentation.

Install

  1. Download the skill as a ZIP:

    https://autogineer.com/agent-skills/mattpocock/retro/download

  2. Unzip it into the cross-client skills folder of your project:

    mkdir -p .agents/skills && unzip retro.zip -d .agents/skills

Documentation by Matt Pocock

The user has asked for a retrospective. You are suggesting improvements to the coding agent's environment to improve future runs.

Steps

  1. Call the Skill tool with writing-for-agents for the writing style guide.

  2. Read the primary sources for the session the user specifies. This may mean searching through session logs on this machine. If the user doesn't specify a session, default to the current one.

  3. Look for candidates for improvement in these categories.

  • Navigation: how easy was it for the agent to find the right files? Are there hidden dependencies between files? Would a navigation pointer make it easier? Use when the session took a long time to find a piece of information.

  • Automated checks: are there automated checks that could catch errors the agent made? Linting, typing, tests, filesystem linters? Read the repo's own check command first (its package.json/build-tool lint/check scripts, its CI workflow), so a check that already exists but sits unwired or silently broken is the finding, not a reinvention. A repo with no guardrail (no pre-commit hook and no CI job running its lint/typecheck/test command) is itself a finding: an un-linted repo is a standing missed opportunity, not a neutral default. Use when the agent made a mistake an automated check could have caught, or the repo has no guardrail at all.

  • Coding standards: should the reviewer agent be given a new rule to enforce? Should an existing rule be removed or clarified? Classify the violation first: a mechanical one (a fixed syntactic pattern, a banned API, an import shape, a file-location rule) gets a deterministic check, full stop: a custom rule in the repo's own linter, a new pre-commit hook, or a new CI job, whichever the repo's language and existing guardrail make cheapest. Default to building the check over writing the rule. Reserve CODING_STANDARDS.md for genuine judgement calls (cross-file consistency, "matches the surrounding style," anything no guardrail could ever substitute for). Use when the reviewer agent failed to catch a mistake.

  • Global AGENTS.md: are there any steering instructions that should be moved to coding standards (or automated checks) instead? Use when the AGENTS.md file is particularly large - in the repo OR the user's global scope.

  • Tool economy: did the agent make expensive tool calls that could be streamlined? Is there any custom tooling (CLI's, MCP's) that is particularly token-inefficient? Use when the agent made an expensive tool call.

  • No-ops: look for instructions in steering files that don't modify the agent's behavior. Use when the steering files are large and unwieldy.

  • Information access: look for opportunities to increase the agent's access to information. Teeing dev server logs, readonly access to third-party services. Use when a crucial piece of information was not available to the agent.

  1. Present these candidates to the user, in order of severity.

Reference

Implementation vs Review

Remember that all work goes through two stages: implementation and review. The implementation agent has the most context pressure. They are responsible for exploration, writing code, and debugging failures.

The review agent has the least context pressure - it receives a diff, so no exploration needed. It often does not need to write code or debug.

This means that the review agent should be responsible for imposing coding standards, not the implementation agent.

Files

You have access to several files in the repo:

  • CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md: these files are pushed to the context window of any agent working in this repo. They should be used incredibly sparingly, usually only for navigation pointers to other files.

  • CODING_STANDARDS.md: this file is read during review, not implementation. Add navigation pointers to docs folders if the standards file gets more than 1,000 lines long.

  • Docs: use docs as references files, pointed to by other files. Look for existing docs before writing new ones.

  • Skills: use skills for docs (since their description goes into the agent's context window), or for user-invoked commands. Follow the advice in the writing-for-agents skill.

Files

agents/openai.yaml

interface:
  display_name: "Retro"
  short_description: "Conduct a retrospective on a coding session."
policy:
  allow_implicit_invocation: false

Requirements and compatibility

Written for: Claude Code

Works with: Claude Code, Claude apps, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Kiro, OpenCode, Goose, Amp, Roo Code, JetBrains Junie, Factory Droid, Devin (ex-Windsurf), Mistral Vibe, OpenHands, Letta

“Works with” means the tool reads the open Agent Skills format; a skill written for one tool may use features others lack.

Needs: Claude Code frontmatter

Security

No issues found by our static scan· No issues found

A static scan is not a guarantee. Skills are third-party content: review a skill before you let an agent use it.

Attribution and licence

Created by
Matt Pocock
Publisher
Matt Pocock (Community)
Source
mattpocock/skills · skills/engineering/retro · commit 4ae2317
Licence
MIT License (redistribution allowed)
  • LICENSE (added by AutoGineer from LICENSE)
  • ATTRIBUTION.md (written by AutoGineer)
Synced

AutoGineer is not affiliated with or endorsed by Matt Pocock or Matt Pocock.

Download ZIP

The ZIP holds the skill’s files, its licence files and an ATTRIBUTION.md. Download retro.zip