/session-reflection

name: session-reflection
description: Use when the user asks to reflect on a session, or when closing substantial work: the orchestrator reconciles the session against memory and the coordination substrate (briefs/plans/tasks/approvals), curates and closes what it can decide on its own, and reports what changed.

Session Reflection

Session reflection is everything the session lived, contrasted against what belongs to each project, until no loop is left dangling. It recovers the whole arc, reconciles it against the durable corpus in both directions, and leaves every item — settled or open — with an owner a later session can find.

Upstream are the transcript, the specialist contracts, and the injected digest. Downstream is memory curation: reflection ends when the corpus is correct. Compaction is a separate act, performed only when the user asks for it.

Process

1. **Recover the whole arc.** Scan from the session opening for accepted and rejected proposals, deferrals, closures, user corrections, and specialist reactions — recency is not weight, an early settled choice still stands. Include `cross_layer_impacts`, `open_gaps`, and `failure_report` findings even where the user never reacted: they are observations about Gaia, not conversational agreements. `reference.md` holds the full recovery pass. 2. **Reconcile in both directions.** For each initiative the session touched, read its live corpus — `gaia memory get-relevant --initiative=<key>` returns that whole pending set uncapped, with bodies — and ask: what did this session produce with no home yet, and what already-open pending did it close, advance, or invalidate? A topic search only answers whether your own phrasing has a row; the closure you owe is usually phrased in terms that predate the session that solved it. Read briefs, plans, tasks, and approvals the same way — a conversation cannot close an object the substrate still shows open. A session that produced any Gaia improvement touched `gaia_system` by definition, whatever project it was nominally working on — sweep it too. `reference.md` holds the reverse-sweep mechanics and the objective-state checks that verify a `SKIP`. 3. **Classify disjointly.** Separate settled decisions and learnings, genuinely open work, and Gaia improvements. When closure is uncertain, classify as open; a lost pending costs more than an extra review. For anything about Gaia itself, `memory/SKILL.md`'s one-line test decides the initiative — `gaia_system` for an observed failure or friction, project-scoped `gaia` for a decision to build or change something. 4. **Give every item a home, and know what the home does.** The pending worklist that returns to the user each session selects `class=thread` with status `carry_forward` or `open` only — an `anchor` still reaches a dispatched agent as held knowledge, but never comes back as work. Filing live work as an anchor hides it; filing settled knowledge as a thread turns the worklist into noise. `SKIP` is a home only when you name the canonical object that owns the item — already-canonical work is referenced, never copied. 5. **Adjudicate against the exception boundary.** The boundary table lives in `memory/SKILL.md` ("Process" step 5) — this is a pointer to it, not a copy. Most operations are decided and executed directly; only the rows the boundary marks "ask first" or "veto" wait on the user. 6. **Run the curation, closures included.** Materialize the step 2 closures alongside the new rows; `reclassify` and `append` are non-mutative, so nothing but omission keeps a resolved thread open. A closing arc that passes the milestone test in `reference.md` uses `checkpoint`, one atomic write; an ordinary close does not. 7. **State the resume point.** One line naming what the next session picks up — a pointer, not a container: everything it names already has a row.

Working tables

These internal tables force one owner per item before curation; omit empty sections. `SAVE`, `APPEND`, `TRANSITION`, `LINK`, and `SKIP` are adjudicated by `memory`; a closure or graduation is a `TRANSITION` materialized as `reclassify`. `memory/reference.md` owns the exact forms.

What we settled

Accepted decisions, closures, and reusable learnings. Prefer `SKIP` naming the canonical object; `SAVE` only knowledge that must constrain a later choice.

| Item | Home | Operation | |---|---|---| | the decision, in the user's words | slug, commit, or brief/plan/task id | SAVE, APPEND, LINK, or SKIP |

Open work

One row per unresolved concern and per pending the sweep found resolved; the latter is a `TRANSITION`, never a silent omission.

| Item | Home | Operation | |---|---|---| | the concern, in the user's words | slug, brief/plan/task id, or initiative | SAVE, APPEND, TRANSITION, LINK, or SKIP |

What Gaia should improve

Symptom observable behavior, not diagnosis Component one precise owner Evidence observed proof Reproduction exact repeatable route, or unknown → feedback_<component>_<symptom> · type feedback · SAVE or APPEND

Work the evidence through before saving; `reference.md` owns field definitions and the `gaia_system` retrieval query.

Output

The user sees a post-curation report, one line per durable effect, not the working tables or raw verbs. Flag a `type=user` row first for its governed veto.

Resume point

Name what the next session picks up. If compacting, hand `gaia-compact` this pointer, never a copied container.

Ownership and consent

Consent mechanics belong to `memory`: the orchestrator recovers, reconciles, and adjudicates, while `gaia-operator` materializes exact instructions. Any operation requiring consent is delegated through its approval flow and never autoexecuted. Independent operations are best-effort; a checkpoint stays atomic, so partial state is never reported as closure. Reflection it