Retrospective

Conduct an end-of-session retrospective. Reviews what went well, what went wrong, how to improve collaboration, and saves lessons to memory.

Sby Skills Guide Bot
ProductivityBeginner
007/26/2026
Claude Code
#retrospective#collaboration#lessons-learned#improvement#session-review

Recommended for


name: retro description: Conduct an end-of-session retrospective. Reviews what went well, what went wrong, how to improve collaboration, and saves lessons to memory.

Skill: retro

Conduct an end-of-session retrospective. TRIGGER when the user invokes /retro or asks to review how the session went.

Instructions

Walk through each section below with the user. Be honest and specific — cite actual moments from the session, not generalities. Use direct language.

1. What went wrong?

Identify things that didn't work well:

  • Misunderstandings or miscommunications
  • Wasted effort (wrong approaches, unnecessary changes, rabbit holes)
  • Bugs introduced, regressions, or things that broke
  • Times I overcomplicated something or under-delivered

2. What went right?

Identify things that worked well:

  • Efficient solutions, clean implementations
  • Good collaboration moments
  • Problems solved on the first try

3. What should we keep doing?

Patterns or practices worth repeating in future sessions.

4. What should we explicitly avoid?

Anti-patterns to watch out for. Be concrete — name the specific behavior, not a vague principle.

5. How can the user interact with me better?

This is critical. Hold the user accountable. Evaluate their instructions and flag:

  • Ambiguous or underspecified requests that led to wrong outcomes
  • Missing context that would have saved time
  • Cases where earlier clarification would have prevented rework
  • Suggestions for how to phrase requests more effectively

Be direct. The user has explicitly asked to be held accountable for poor instructions. Do not soften feedback — give actionable, specific suggestions.

6. Configuration health check

Do a web search for current Claude Code best practices and configuration options. Look for:

  • New features or configuration mechanisms that have been added (rules, hooks, agents, plugins, .claudeignore, etc.)
  • Common misconfigurations or gaps in typical setups
  • Improvements to how memory, CLAUDE.md, and hooks work together

Report any gaps or opportunities specific to this project's current setup. Be concrete — name specific files or settings to add/change, not general advice.

7. Lessons to remember

For each lesson worth saving, classify it into one of three buckets before writing:

  • Project-specific — tied to this codebase's conventions, stack, or tooling (e.g. ENV must be "prod", just module path behaviour). Save to the project memory directory.
  • Language-specific — a habit that applies to all projects in a given language (e.g. Python packaging conventions, test mirroring). Save to ~/.claude/rules/<language>.md, creating the file if it doesn't exist. If the current project's CLAUDE.md doesn't already import that rules file, add @~/.claude/rules/<language>.md at the top.
  • Universal — applies regardless of language or project (e.g. collaboration habits, tool-use patterns). Save to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md under a ## General Habits section. Keep this list short — only rules that would genuinely apply everywhere.

Present the classification to the user for each lesson and ask for confirmation before writing anything.

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