improve-workflow

Improve the factory, not just the journal

Mandatory at least every120 wall-clock minutes during unfinished work, and on user correction, substantial overrun, repeated route failure and cycle completion. Every maximum overrun requires a route decision. Overseer demands the accepted business result; a learning receipt never replaces it or justifies CONTINUE. The objective clock survives phase changes and compaction. Use the persistent lhc_time_guard checkpoint; notification is not completion. With no native hook, check manually at work boundaries; after idle periods check on resumption without background wakeups. Use also after a meaningful reusable signal, or for a selected factory-improvement task. A brief consideration is enough when there is no useful observation. Do not append four empty answers after every task.

Keep inspection within five minutes and choose at most one actionable correction. Compare cumulative cost and accepted user results before selecting it. Record observation, changed method, verification and next route in the existing task, then explicitly acknowledge the checkpoint. Evidence-backed no-change is valid when no improvement is indicated; repeated failure makes that excuse invalid. Do not reset the clock, start a new feature, fabricate evidence or create a new memory system to satisfy this rule. See common/protocols/SELF_IMPROVE.md for the bounded loop; Hermes uses its verified native learning owner at the same cadence.

Capture and place

For a deliberate shortcut with a real known ceiling, keep the ceiling and the observable trigger for revisiting it beside the code (a short ponytail: comment) or in the owning project's existing task. Reuse that record; do not build a second debt database or run a mandatory whole-repo scan. On a relevant debt review, summarize marked shortcuts as location, limit, revisit trigger; missing triggers are actionable. Ordinary simple code needs no debt marker.

Record the observed episode, conditions and evidence. Include successful shortcuts, not only failures. Find an existing matching lesson before duplicating it. Classify the improvement at the right owner: project fact, user preference, reusable skill, mechanical script, model-routing hint, or genuinely changed role responsibility. A local mistake does not automatically justify a global rule.