speckit-retro

User Input

$ARGUMENTS

Why this exists

/speckit-harden judges code mid-flight. /speckit-learn mines a session for instincts. code-reviewer and spec-reviewer judge a diff. Nothing read a finished feature as a whole and said whether it was any good — feature 007 reached seventy-three done tasks and no artifact in this repository recorded a verdict on it.

BMAD's retrospective is the missing step, and its discipline is the part worth copying: it reads "the specs, story records, full diff, commits, and tracking files", and "every finding carries a source reference: a file, a line, a commit, a log." A retrospective assembled from memory is a feeling.

Phase 1 — gather, do not recall

node .claude/scripts/retro-evidence.mjs specs/<feature>          # human-readable
node .claude/scripts/retro-evidence.mjs specs/<feature> --json   # machine-readable
node .claude/scripts/retro-evidence.mjs specs/<feature> --since <ref> --jev   # + a suggested verdict to argue with

That gives you: artifacts present, tasks open/done, requirements declared and retired, the ## Spec Delta and whether its capabilities exist, every commit that touched the feature, the diff stat and file list, open deferred findings, and open action items carried in from earlier retrospectives.

Then read what the counts point at — the actual diff, the actual files. The script reports; it does not judge, and it cannot tell you whether an abstraction earned its place.

Phase 2 — look for what no single review could see

A per-diff review cannot see accumulation. These are the four questions:

1. Patterns that grew a commit at a time. An abstraction that gained a caller per story until nobody would introduce it today. A helper that became a second way to do something the codebase already did.
2. Spec divergence. Requirements delivered differently from how they were written. For each: is the spec now wrong, or is the code? The answer becomes a Modifies in the ## Spec Delta before /speckit-archive runs.
3. Runtime behaviour. Run the thing. npm test passing is not the same claim as the feature working.
4. Carryover. Items the last retrospective left open that this feature was expected to address — say plainly whether each was.

Every finding cites path:line, a commit hash, or a command and its output. A finding you cannot source is one you drop.

Phase 3 — the verdict

One of exactly three, in the frontmatter:

Verdict	Meaning
accepted	meets its acceptance criteria; nothing outstanding blocks the next feature
accepted-with-open-items	meets them, with named action items carried forward
rejected	does not meet them — say which criterion, and what would change that

A verdict with no stated criterion is an opinion. Name what you judged it against: the spec's success criteria, the constitution, the acceptance scenarios.

Phase 4 — write it

Copy .specify/templates/retrospective-template.md to specs/<feature>/retrospective.md and fill it in. Open checkboxes under Action items are what .claude/scripts/retro-evidence.mjs carries into the next feature's retrospective, so leave one open only if it is genuinely still owed — an open item nobody intends to do trains everyone to ignore the list.

Then:

1. node .claude/scripts/run-state.mjs set --status done --phase retro
2. Hand off to /speckit-archive, which merges the Spec Delta into the living capability specs.
3. Commit it to the private specs repository, where the feature folder lives: node .claude/scripts/specs-repo.mjs commit "docs(specs): ST-<n> retrospective" -- <feature> (never git add specs/ on the motor-fix branch, which ignores specs/).

Boundaries

• It proposes action items; it never assigns them to a person who has not agreed, and it never silently fixes what it finds. A fix is a new change with its own level (/speckit-size) — that separation is the same one the Agent Execution Rules draw between the deliverable and a follow-up.
• It never edits code, tests or the spec. A spec correction it identifies goes into the ## Spec Delta, which /speckit-archive applies.
• rejected is a real option. A retrospective that can only ever accept is theatre.