retro-distill

retro-distill is a skill for Codex from TAKEOFF69/codex-skills-kit. It costs 104 tokens per session (3,917 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured review of recent coding-agent work that extracts reusable lessons, mistakes, and workflow improvements. Self-distillation means learning from previous outputs and keeping the patterns that worked.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for a quick review of one session, a deeper review of several sessions, or an investigation into what went wrong.
Why use it?
It helps turn experience from past sessions into clearer rules and better future work.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions AGENTS.md; mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it for a quick review of one session, a deeper review of several sessions, or an investigation into what went wrong.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/takeoff69/codex-skills-kit/retro-distill
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add TAKEOFF69/codex-skills-kit --skill retro-distill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TAKEOFF69/codex-skills-kit

Made for: Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for retro-distill

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/takeoff69/codex-skills-kit/retro-distill/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/takeoff69/codex-skills-kit/retro-distill)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/takeoff69/codex-skills-kit/retro-distill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/takeoff69/codex-skills-kit/retro-distill/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for retro-distill

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/takeoff69/codex-skills-kit/retro-distill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/takeoff69/codex-skills-kit/retro-distill.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 104 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,917 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00104 $0.03917
Opus 5 $0.00052 $0.01959
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00783
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00392

Measured 8d ago against content hash 60ab43e22fd7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

retro-distill scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/retro-distill/SKILL.md · 294 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 294 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Self-Distillation Retrospective

You run structured retrospectives on recent AI coding-agent sessions to extract reusable patterns, anti-patterns, and workflow improvements. This is your self-improvement loop – inspired by simple self-distillation (SSD), where a model improves by sampling its own outputs, truncating the bad tails, and reshaping what remains.

The loop: Sessions produce outputs (samples) --> retro identifies what worked and what didn't (truncation) --> learnings get codified into skills, memories, and rules (reshaping) --> future sessions benefit.

Before Starting

1. Determine retro mode

Mode Trigger Depth Time
Quick User says "retro", or a major chunk or failure merits learning capture Review current session only 2-3 min
Deep After 5-10 sessions, user says "deep retro" or "distill" Batch review of recent session logs 10-15 min
Failure Something went wrong, user says "failure retro" or "what went wrong" Root-cause analysis of a specific failure 5-10 min

Default to Quick unless the user specifies otherwise.

2. Gather inputs

Quick mode:

  • Review the current conversation context
  • Check recent git log for what was committed

Deep mode:

  • Read the last 5-10 session logs from your session-logs directory (e.g. {your session-logs dir})
  • Search relevant feedback memories by touched domain and failure pattern; do not bulk-load unrelated history
  • Read the current anti-pattern lists in any skill references/

Failure mode:

  • Get the specific failure context (error, bad output, wasted effort)
  • Read the session log where it happened
  • Read the relevant skill/prompt that produced the failure

Quick Retro Protocol

Run through these four questions for the current session:

Q1: What worked? (Fork preservation)

Identify approaches that produced good results – especially non-obvious ones the system doesn't already codify. These are "forks" that led to correct solutions.

Read the full file on GitHub · 294 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 294 lines · 104 tokens per session scan A 60ab43e22fd7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

retro-distill is a skill published in the GitHub repository TAKEOFF69/codex-skills-kit (7 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 104 tokens to every session and 3,917 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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