The background skill-review prompts (_SKILL_REVIEW_PROMPT and the **Skills**
half of _COMBINED_REVIEW_PROMPT) steered the reviewer toward passive
behavior — most passes concluded 'Nothing to save.' even when the session
produced real lessons. User-preference corrections (style, format,
legibility, verbosity) were especially lost: they were read as memory
signals only, so skills never carried the fix.
This rewrite changes the stance:
- **Active-update bias.** The reviewer now treats inaction as a missed
learning opportunity. 'Nothing to save.' remains an explicit escape
but is no longer framed as the most-common outcome.
- **User-preference corrections are first-class skill signals.** Style,
tone, format, legibility, verbosity complaints — and the actual
phrasings users use ('stop doing X', 'this is too verbose', 'I hate
when you Y', 'remember this') — now warrant patching the skill that
governs the task, not just writing to memory.
- **Loaded-skill-first preference order.** When a skill was loaded via
/skill-name or skill_view during the session, the reviewer patches
THAT one first. It was in play; it's the right place.
- **Four-step ladder: patch-loaded → patch-umbrella → support-file →
create.** Support files are explicitly enumerated as three kinds:
* references/<topic>.md — session-specific detail OR condensed
knowledge banks (quoted research, API docs excerpts, domain notes)
* templates/<name>.<ext> — starter files to copy and modify
* scripts/<name>.<ext> — statically re-runnable actions
- **Name-veto for CREATE.** New skill names MUST be class-level — no PR
numbers, error strings, codenames, library-alone names, or session
artifacts ('fix-X / debug-Y / audit-Z-today'). If the proposed name
only fits today's task, fall back to one of the patch/support-file
options.
- **Memory scope clarified.** 'who the user is and what the current
situation and state of your operations are' — MEMORY.md is
situational/state, USER.md is identity/preferences.
- **Curator handoff.** Reviewer flags overlap; the background curator
handles consolidation at scale. Single-session reviewer doesn't
attempt umbrella-rebalancing.
Tests: tests/run_agent/test_review_prompt_class_first.py upgraded to
assert the new behavioral contracts (active bias, user-correction
signals, loaded-skill-first, support-file kinds, name-veto, memory
framing, curator handoff). 17 tests, all pass.
Co-authored-by: teknium1 <teknium@users.noreply.github.com>
The background skill-review prompt (spawned after N user turns) now instructs
the reviewer to SURVEY existing skills first, identify the CLASS of task, and
PREFER updating/generalizing an existing skill over creating a new narrow one.
This reduces near-duplicate skill accumulation at the source. Catches the
common failure mode where repeated tasks of the same class each spawn their
own specific skill ("fix-my-tauri-error", "fix-my-electron-error") instead
of a single class-level skill ("desktop-app-build-troubleshooting").
Applied to both _SKILL_REVIEW_PROMPT and the **Skills** half of
_COMBINED_REVIEW_PROMPT. Memory-only review prompt unchanged.
Groundwork for the Curator feature (issue #7816) — the creation-side fix.
Curator handles the retirement/consolidation side in a follow-up PR.
Tests assert the behavioral instructions are present (survey, class, update-
over-create, overlap-flagging, opt-out clause) rather than snapshotting the
full prompt text.
