typmem-retro

Write the diary entry for a chunk of work. A retro is the story of what happened to you — useful to tomorrow-you (or your successor) who needs to resume quickly. It is one of several memory layers under ~/.typmem/memory/; retro is the raw diary lane, not a reviewed or promoted artifact.

Retro vs learning — read this first

This single distinction governs everything:

• Retro = diary. "What happened to me." Has an I, a timeline, decisions, dead ends, loose threads. Useful soon, decays fast — three months later most of it is noise because the work moved on.
• Learning = recipe card. "What I now know about the world." A distilled fact with no story, no timeline, no I. True regardless of which day or project produced it. Useful to anyone, indefinitely. Learnings live elsewhere — typmem-learn handles them.

The test to tell them apart: "Will this still matter after the work that produced it is finished?"

• No → it is retro material (status, decisions-in-flight, follow-ups). Write it here.
• Yes → it is a learning. Do NOT bury it in the diary; flag it (see step 7) and let typmem-learn capture it.

A retro is allowed and expected to be messy, first-person, and time-ordered. That is the point — do not sanitize it into a polished report.

What goes in a retro

Guidance, not a rigid template (the body format is intentionally loose for now — just write the story):

• What you set out to do this session
• What actually happened (a rough timeline is fine)
• Decisions you made, and why
• Dead ends — things you tried that did not work, and what you ruled out
• Where things stand now: unfinished threads, what's paused, the next step for tomorrow-you

How to write it

1. Resolve today's date in local time as YYYY-MM-DD.
2. Make sure the directory exists: mkdir -p ~/.typmem/memory/retro
3. Build a short slug describing what this session was about: lowercase kebab-case, 2–5 words, hyphen-separated, no spaces (e.g. aca-tailscale-sidecar, resh-rhai-parser).
4. Target file: ~/.typmem/memory/retro/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md (date prefix + slug — retro is the only memory layer that uses a date in the filename). Each session/topic gets its own file.
5. Create the file with this frontmatter, then the diary body:

```

author: <agent name or person writing this> created: YYYY-MM-DD

`` If a file with that exact name already exists (you re-ran on the same topic the same day), do NOT overwrite it — append a ## HH:MM — <short label>` section at the end instead.

1. Write the body as a diary per the guidance above. Keep the diary discipline — rough and honest beats polished.
2. Before finishing, scan what you wrote for any durable facts (recipe cards) that snuck in. For each one, tell the user it belongs in a learning and suggest running typmem-learn — but do not write to learnings/ from this skill yourself.

File rules

• Location: ~/.typmem/memory/retro/
• Filename: YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md (one file per session/topic; slug is a short lowercase kebab-case descriptor)
• Frontmatter (MVP): author, created. No reviewer — retro is never reviewed.
• Body: free-form diary, no fixed template yet.

Don't

• Don't put durable facts or lessons here — those are learnings (typmem-learn).
• Don't overwrite an existing retro file — if the name collides, append a new timestamped section instead.
• Don't add a reviewer field or try to promote a retro. Retro is a side lane that feeds learnings; it is not on the promotion ladder (learnings → precedents → rules).