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The improvement cycle

Pattern of the rule task-flow. What must be true meanwhile — the law docs/constitution/work-conduct.md.

When to use

• An edit of a rule, a hook, a check or a role is being chosen.
• A task about such an edit is being written.
• The result of such an edit is being judged.

An edit chosen by opinion has no way to be proved wrong, so nobody learns whether it helped. A repair of something broken is not an improvement and needs no cycle: its task names the failure instead.

Order

The report opens the cycle

The cycle begins with the numbers, not with an idea of what to improve.

npx agent-kit metrics

The worst driver of the main metric is named with its numbers: which resource, how many refusals, runs or minutes. A tree that sends its numbers reads the same in the receiver over all its copies. No data means no cycle: the text says so, and nothing is chosen by a guess.

One task, one metric, one direction

The task changes one thing and carries one line:

**Metric:** empty refusals of `git-guard-push`, down. Baseline: 0.42 over 30 days, noise 0.05.

• The direction is a word, not a target. A target needs a baseline first, and two weeks of data or ten accepted tasks come before one.
• Two metrics mean two tasks. Two edits in one release cannot be told apart in the next report.
• The edit does not raise its own numbers. The observations are not edited, and a metric is not redefined by the task that is judged by it.

The next report gives the verdict

The same trees are compared, on a version with the edit against themselves before it. A tree that has not installed the version does not count.

• The executor who made the edit gives no verdict. The role goal-critic reads the numbers.
• A movement below the noise is not a result. The noise is the spread of the metric between the weeks of the baseline, and it is named with it.

An edit that moved nothing is named so

The report says «не сдвинулось», with the two numbers. It is not reworded as a partial success and not explained by the days being unusual. Such an edit is reverted or kept by a decision of the owner, and the next cycle starts from the report again.

Common misses

• A metric picked after the edit. A number chosen once the result is known finds a movement in any edit. The line stands in the task before the first commit.
• Reading one's own tree as the package. One tree is the partial view: it lacks completeness and repeated mistakes.
• A rising count taken for a worse rule. More refusals also come from more work. A share is read against its denominator.

The report in this tree

The package is built here from its sources and is not installed, so npx agent-kit finds no command. The report is taken from the build:

pnpm run build:agent-kit && node dist/agent-kit/bin/agent-kit.js metrics --days 30