claude-pipeline: Skill for Claude Code

The Improvement Loop

Overview

Improve the .claude/ pipeline after resolving the issue at hand — never during. When a skill, agent, hook, or script produces bad output, work through to the correct solution first, then update the pipeline with what you learned.

Core principle: Fix first, understand fully, improve last. Premature edits encode partial understanding.

When to Use

digraph when_to_use {
    "Issue resolved successfully?" [shape=diamond];
    "Root cause in pipeline file?" [shape=diamond];
    "Worth encoding permanently?" [shape=diamond];
    "Run improvement cycle" [shape=box style=filled fillcolor=lightgreen];
    "Keep working on the issue" [shape=box];
    "Skip - not a pipeline problem" [shape=box];
    "Skip - one-off or too specific" [shape=box];

    "Issue resolved successfully?" -> "Root cause in pipeline file?" [label="yes"];
    "Issue resolved successfully?" -> "Keep working on the issue" [label="no - finish first"];
    "Root cause in pipeline file?" -> "Worth encoding permanently?" [label="yes"];
    "Root cause in pipeline file?" -> "Skip - not a pipeline problem" [label="no"];
    "Worth encoding permanently?" -> "Run improvement cycle" [label="yes"];
    "Worth encoding permanently?" -> "Skip - one-off or too specific" [label="no"];
}

Trigger conditions (suggest to user):

• An agent produced incorrect output that required manual correction
• A skill was missing guidance that caused a wrong approach
• The same mistake has occurred more than once across sessions
• A hook failed to catch something it should have
• An orchestration script hit an unhandled edge case
• A subagent asked questions that the agent definition should have answered
• Review feedback repeatedly flags the same class of issue

Do NOT trigger:

• While still debugging or iterating on the original issue
• For one-off problems unlikely to recur
• For issues outside the pipeline (user error, external service failures)
• When the fix is a code change, not a pipeline change