self-improving-skills-review

Codex Self-Improvement Review

Use this skill to decide whether a recent interaction should update Codex's reusable skills. Treat skills as procedural memory: they record how to do a class of task, not one-off facts.

Review Policy

Inspect the current thread evidence before writing anything. Then walk this ladder and act on the EARLIEST rung that applies (Hermes review-priority order):

1. Patch a skill that was in play this session. If a skill was loaded or invoked ($skill-name) during this thread and it turned out wrong, stale, or incomplete — that is the skill to fix first. It routed the work, so its gaps are exactly what future sessions will hit.
2. Extend an existing relevant skill. Prefer adding the gotcha, corrected step, or example to a skill that already governs this class of task over creating a new narrow sibling.
3. Embed the corrected preference in the governing skill. User corrections about workflow, tone, formatting, or verification belong in the body of the skill that governs that class of task — so the next session starts already corrected.
4. Create a new skill — last resort. Only when the learning is class-level and likely to recur, and no existing skill covers it.

Additional rules:

• Name anti-patterns (a bad name means the knowledge is not class-level — fall back up the ladder or capture nothing): a PR number, an error string, a session label like fix-X / debug-Y, a bare library name with no technique, anything tied to one instance.
• Duplicates: report, don't merge. If you notice two skills covering the same ground, note it in your output — consolidation is the $codex-skill-curator pass's job, not the review's.
• Do not encode transient errors that resolved within the session (if a retry worked, the lesson — if any — is the retry pattern, not the failure), missing binaries, one-off paths, temporary outages, or negative claims like "tool X does not work". Setup failures are capturable only as the FIX (install command, config, env var).
• Never edit bundled/system/admin skills. Work in user or repo skill roots only.
• Keep changes small, make a backup first, and report the diff summary.