What happened
The retro agent definition at agents/retro.md delegates behavioral constraints to skills, stating "See the retro-analysis skill for the proposal object schema and writing guidance." The evidence-for prohibition lives only in skills/retro-analysis/SKILL.md (line 145), buried in the "Before proposing" section after several paragraphs about duplicate checking. The agent ignores this instruction frequently enough that PR #85 needed to add a post-script gate, referencing fullsend-ai/fullsend#3881.
What could go better
The agent definition is loaded first and establishes the agent's core identity and constraints. The output rules section of agents/retro.md already has a bullet list of rules ("Write ONLY the JSON file", "The JSON must be valid", etc.) — adding the evidence-for prohibition here would place it alongside other hard output constraints rather than in a procedural section of the skill.
This is a prompt engineering improvement. There is no guarantee that moving the instruction will fix the compliance issue entirely (the post-script gate should remain regardless), but making the constraint more prominent in the agent definition could reduce the frequency of violations.
Confidence: Medium — prompt placement effects are empirical. The hypothesis is reasonable (more prominent placement → higher compliance) but the effect size is uncertain. The cost of the change is very low (one additional bullet point).
Note: GitHub API was unavailable during this retro, so I could not verify whether an open issue already covers this improvement.
Proposed change
In agents/retro.md, add a bullet to the "Output rules" section:
- Do NOT file proposals that corroborate existing issues. If your analysis produces evidence supporting an open issue, mention it in the `summary` field with the issue number — do NOT create a new proposal titled "Evidence for #XXXX" or similar. Evidence proposals create duplicate noise.
This reinforces the skill-level instruction at the agent definition level, where it is more likely to be attended to during output generation.
Validation criteria
- The rate of evidence-for proposals reaching the post-script gate decreases over the next 10 retro runs.
- The change does not introduce false negatives — legitimate proposals that happen to mention evidence or existing issue numbers continue to be filed normally.
Generated by retro agent from #85
What happened
The retro agent definition at
agents/retro.mddelegates behavioral constraints to skills, stating "See theretro-analysisskill for the proposal object schema and writing guidance." The evidence-for prohibition lives only inskills/retro-analysis/SKILL.md(line 145), buried in the "Before proposing" section after several paragraphs about duplicate checking. The agent ignores this instruction frequently enough that PR #85 needed to add a post-script gate, referencing fullsend-ai/fullsend#3881.What could go better
The agent definition is loaded first and establishes the agent's core identity and constraints. The output rules section of
agents/retro.mdalready has a bullet list of rules ("Write ONLY the JSON file", "The JSON must be valid", etc.) — adding the evidence-for prohibition here would place it alongside other hard output constraints rather than in a procedural section of the skill.This is a prompt engineering improvement. There is no guarantee that moving the instruction will fix the compliance issue entirely (the post-script gate should remain regardless), but making the constraint more prominent in the agent definition could reduce the frequency of violations.
Confidence: Medium — prompt placement effects are empirical. The hypothesis is reasonable (more prominent placement → higher compliance) but the effect size is uncertain. The cost of the change is very low (one additional bullet point).
Note: GitHub API was unavailable during this retro, so I could not verify whether an open issue already covers this improvement.
Proposed change
In
agents/retro.md, add a bullet to the "Output rules" section:This reinforces the skill-level instruction at the agent definition level, where it is more likely to be attended to during output generation.
Validation criteria
Generated by retro agent from #85