What happened
On PR #12 in fullsend-ai/agents, the review agent flagged customer-research as a missing skill dependency in agents/prioritize.md at medium severity across 4 review iterations. The agent prompt body uses conditional language ("If the customer-research skill is available, use it"), indicating graceful degradation by design. Despite this signal in the same file, the review agent treated the missing directory as a dependency error every time.
What could go better
The review agent has no concept of "extension point" skills — skills declared in frontmatter that are intentionally absent, with the agent prompt designed to degrade gracefully when they are not available. The conditional language pattern ("if available", "if the X skill is available") is a strong signal that the skill is optional. When the review agent sees a frontmatter skill declaration with no corresponding directory, it should check whether the agent's prompt body uses conditional/optional language for that skill. If so, the finding severity should be reduced to info or suppressed entirely. Confidence: medium — this heuristic would work for the current case but might need refinement for edge cases where conditional language is used for required skills that happen to be missing.
Proposed change
In the review agent's correctness or style sub-agent definitions, add guidance for evaluating agent definition files: when a skill is declared in frontmatter but has no corresponding directory, check whether the agent's prompt uses conditional language for that skill (e.g., "if available", "if the X skill is available", "when available"). If the prompt handles the skill's absence gracefully, downgrade the finding from medium to info severity with a note that the skill appears to be an optional extension point. This change belongs in the pr-review skill's sub-agent definitions or the review agent's main definition.
Validation criteria
On the next review of a PR touching an agent definition with extension point skills, the review agent should either not flag the missing directory or flag it at info severity with a note about the conditional language pattern. Verify on 2 PRs touching agent definitions with optional skill references.
Generated by retro agent from fullsend-ai/agents#13
What happened
On PR #12 in
fullsend-ai/agents, the review agent flaggedcustomer-researchas a missing skill dependency inagents/prioritize.mdat medium severity across 4 review iterations. The agent prompt body uses conditional language ("If the customer-research skill is available, use it"), indicating graceful degradation by design. Despite this signal in the same file, the review agent treated the missing directory as a dependency error every time.What could go better
The review agent has no concept of "extension point" skills — skills declared in frontmatter that are intentionally absent, with the agent prompt designed to degrade gracefully when they are not available. The conditional language pattern ("if available", "if the X skill is available") is a strong signal that the skill is optional. When the review agent sees a frontmatter skill declaration with no corresponding directory, it should check whether the agent's prompt body uses conditional/optional language for that skill. If so, the finding severity should be reduced to
infoor suppressed entirely. Confidence: medium — this heuristic would work for the current case but might need refinement for edge cases where conditional language is used for required skills that happen to be missing.Proposed change
In the review agent's correctness or style sub-agent definitions, add guidance for evaluating agent definition files: when a skill is declared in frontmatter but has no corresponding directory, check whether the agent's prompt uses conditional language for that skill (e.g., "if available", "if the X skill is available", "when available"). If the prompt handles the skill's absence gracefully, downgrade the finding from medium to info severity with a note that the skill appears to be an optional extension point. This change belongs in the pr-review skill's sub-agent definitions or the review agent's main definition.
Validation criteria
On the next review of a PR touching an agent definition with extension point skills, the review agent should either not flag the missing directory or flag it at info severity with a note about the conditional language pattern. Verify on 2 PRs touching agent definitions with optional skill references.
Generated by retro agent from fullsend-ai/agents#13