Manual Retrospective

March 29, 2026 · View on GitHub

A manual retrospective is a way to ask the garden for a bounded look back over recent work.

It does not create a new runtime goal type. It submits an ordinary evaluate goal for the gardener plant, using the existing retrospective protocol in plants/gardener/skills/retrospective-pass.md.

What it does for you

  • Queues one explicit retrospective goal instead of waiting for background automation.
  • Records the retrospective contract on the goal itself:
    • what window-selection rule to use
    • how many recent substantive runs to fall back to
    • whether one bounded follow-up goal is allowed
  • Leaves execution, cost recording, and ordinary goal tracking to the normal system.

How to use it

pak2 retrospective --root .

Useful flags:

  • --recent-run-limit N sets the fallback cap when no earlier retrospective boundary exists. Valid range: 3-10. Default: 5.
  • --allow-follow-up-goal changes the action boundary from observe-only to "at most one bounded follow-up goal".

The command prints Submitted: <goal-id> on success.

What it does not do

  • It does not introduce a retrospective runtime goal type.
  • It does not start a scheduler or background cadence.
  • It does not update memory or knowledge files at submission time.
  • It does not run the retrospective immediately. It only queues the goal.

If something goes wrong

  • If the retrospective contract is malformed, submission is rejected with a named reason code.
  • If gardener does not exist or is inactive, ordinary goal assignment validation rejects the submission.

For the exact field contract and rejection codes, see Level 2 and Level 3.