reflect-command

Summary

Re-seeded on a release on 2026-09-29 (itd-24 decision 5, the product thinker's ruling AD): a retrospective starts from the intents a tag shipped. This spec was first written at the phase grain and re-read on 2026-09-21 as the release (adr-2609212115255771); the scope below is now written at the release grain, so no reading rule is needed.

The design record for itd-24, from the product thinker's interviews of 2026-09-21 and 2026-09-29 (decisions 1 to 5 on the intent). One host-run interview, /abcd:reflect <release-tag>, seeded from what the release actually shipped, written to the durable record tier, packed by the lifeboat and surfaced on embark.

Scope

1. The seed: the intents the tag shipped, read the way the release cut reads them: those that reached shipped/ between the previous release tag and this one, less any whose shipped_in names another release, plus any in shipped/ now whose shipped_in names this one. Amended on 2026-09-30 under ruling AD ("seed from A RELEASE (the intents a tag shipped)"): the first wording read membership from shipped_in alone, but no cut writes that stamp, so it found nothing for any release cut the ordinary way; the stamp now moves a record between releases rather than defining membership. For each, the ## Audit Notes the intent auditor wrote (per-criterion verdicts, honoured / diverged / missing) and its impact; and the changelog section the cut composed for the tag. The seed says so when a shipped intent carries no audit notes (criteria 1, 2).
2. The interview: five sections in order (went well, could improve, lessons, decisions, metrics), one question at a time through the host's question tool under the GRILL rules; the metrics section is computed (intents shipped, audit-note severity distribution, the tag's date and the previous tag's), not asked (criterion 1).
3. The thin-answer rule: an answer under a declared floor (one clause, or a restatement of the section heading) is met with one follow-up question before anything is written (criterion 4).
4. Refusals and warnings: a tag that shipped no intent refuses and writes nothing; a release with intents whose target_release names it still unshipped warns, lists them, and asks before proceeding; a shipped intent with no audit notes is offered abcd intent audit <itd-N> first, and the interview continues either way (criteria 2, 3, 7).
5. The output: .abcd/development/retrospectives/<release-tag>/README.md, frontmatter naming the tag, the intents, the date and the seed's provenance (which audits fed it), five sections, links to the changelog section and each intent; never a copy of the audit notes (criterion 1).
6. The nudge: one line at the end of launch ship, when the cut is written, that a retrospective for the release is owed and the command to run; it is printed once (the retrospective's absence is not re-announced) and gates nothing (criterion 8, decision 1).
7. The lifeboat: disembark packs .abcd/development/retrospectives/ whole; embark ranks the packed retrospectives' lessons against the new voyage's brief by term overlap with the brief's framing chapter and shows the top three with the rest as a list, asking which apply (criteria 5, 6, decision 2).

Out of scope

• An audit of its own: the seed is the per-intent audit.
• Per-intent or per-spec retrospectives.
• A date or tag range as the seed, and phase documents as the seed (the alternatives decision 5 did not take).
• Editing a retrospective after it is written; a second run on the same tag refuses naming the existing file.

Approach

internal/core/reflect holds the seed builder (reads the tag and the intents it shipped, per scope 1), the metrics, the thin-answer floor and the writer; the interview itself is host-run from commands/reflect.md, which renders the seed and the five sections and calls abcd reflect write <release-tag> --answers <file> with the answers. The nudge is one line in launch ship. Lifeboat packing extends the record-family list disembark already carries; the embark ranking scores with the canonical term-overlap primitive, internal/core/record/match (spc-2609212141417782), declared a heuristic.

How the criteria are satisfied