session-reflection

Session Reflection

Session reflection is everything the session lived, contrasted against what belongs to each project, until no loop is left dangling. It recovers the whole arc, reconciles it against the durable corpus in both directions, and leaves every item — settled or open — with an owner a later session can find.

Upstream are the transcript, the specialist contracts, and the injected digest. Downstream is memory curation: reflection ends when the corpus is correct. Compaction is a separate act, performed only when the user asks for it.

Process

1. Recover the whole arc. Scan from the session opening for accepted and rejected proposals, deferrals, closures, user corrections, and specialist reactions — recency is not weight, an early settled choice still stands. Include cross_layer_impacts, open_gaps, and failure_report findings even where the user never reacted: they are observations about Gaia, not conversational agreements. reference.md holds the full recovery pass.
2. Reconcile in both directions. For each initiative the session touched, read its live corpus — gaia memory get-relevant --initiative=<key> returns that whole pending set uncapped, with bodies — and ask: what did this session produce with no home yet, and what already-open pending did it close, advance, or invalidate? A topic search only answers whether your own phrasing has a row; the closure you owe is usually phrased in terms that predate the session that solved it. Read briefs, plans, tasks, and approvals the same way — a conversation cannot close an object the substrate still shows open. A session that produced any Gaia improvement touched gaia_system by definition, whatever project it was nominally working on — sweep it too. reference.md holds the reverse-sweep mechanics and the objective-state checks that verify a SKIP.
3. Classify disjointly. Separate settled decisions and learnings, genuinely open work, and Gaia improvements. When closure is uncertain, classify as open; a lost pending costs more than an extra review. For anything about Gaia itself, memory/SKILL.md's one-line test decides the initiative — gaia_system for an observed failure or friction, project-scoped gaia for a decision to build or change something.
4. Give every item a home, and know what the home does. The pending worklist that returns to the user each session selects class=thread with status carry_forward or open only — an anchor still reaches a dispatched agent as held knowledge, but never comes back as work. Filing live work as an anchor hides it; filing settled knowledge as a thread turns the worklist into noise. SKIP is a home only when you name the canonical object that owns the item — already-canonical work is referenced, never copied.
5. Adjudicate against the exception boundary. The boundary table lives in memory/SKILL.md ("Process" step 5) — this is a pointer to it, not a copy. Most operations are decided and executed directly; only the rows the boundary marks "ask first" or "veto" wait on the user.
6. Run the curation, closures included. Materialize the step 2 closures alongside the new rows; reclassify and append are non-mutative, so nothing but omission keeps a resolved thread open. A closing arc that passes the milestone test in reference.md uses checkpoint, one atomic write; an ordinary close does not.
7. State the resume point. One line naming what the next session picks up — a pointer, not a container: everything it names already has a row.