saving-session-learnings

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• SKILL.md

SKILL.md (first lines)

# Saving Session Learnings

Close every session by banking what it taught you. Unsaved learnings get relearned at full cost.

## When

- End of a work session.
- After a major milestone: plan executed, incident resolved, feature merged.

Keep it under five minutes. A learning ritual that slows work gets skipped.

## Step 1: Evaluate Performance

Three questions, answered with evidence from the session (ledger, rulings, test runs):

- **What worked?** Name the practice, not the feeling. ("Pre-flight scan caught two type mismatches before dispatch.")
- **What struggled?** Failures, rework rounds, stalls, wrong first guesses — verbatim from the ledger where possible.
- **What changes next time?** Each struggle maps to one concrete change: a rule, a check, a script, a skill edit. No change means it was an observation, not a learning.

## Step 2: Distill Key Knowledge

Separate session trivia from durable knowledge. Durable = useful in a future session without this one's context:

- Project facts: architecture decisions, environment quirks, where credentials live (never the secrets themselves).
- Rulings made and their reasoning (SDD ledger `Ruling:` lines).
- Failure signatures: symptom → root cause → fix.
- Your human partner's preferences and corrections.

## Step 3: Persist

Two stores, two purposes:

1. **Project folder:** `docs/smartpowers/learnings/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>.md` — the full evaluation: performance answers, rulings, follow-ups. Commit it with the work.
2. **Memory store:** if your harness has persistent memory, save only the durable cross-session facts — one or two sentences each. Project-specific detail stays in the project; memory is for what travels.

Format for future-you: context line, the knowledge, the evidence. No narrative retelling of the session.

## Step 4: Feed the Loop

If a learning indicts a skill — a rule was unclear, a check was missing — record the proposed edit in the learnings file and apply it via `smartpowers:writing-skills` next session. Learnings that never change the system are trivia.

## Rationalization Table

| Excuse | Reality |
|--------|---------|
| "Nothing new happened this session" | Then write one line saying so. The ritual staying cheap is what keeps it alive. |
| "I'll remember it" | You won't — context resets. The file remembers. |
| "Too busy wrapping up" | Five minutes now beats re-deriving it under pressure later. |

From ruca-radio/smartpowers, MIT.

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