--- name: skill-distillation tier: "2" description: Enforces Law 7 (Learn From Every Session) of the 7 Laws of AI Agent Discipline. Distills repeated successful tool sequences into reusable draft instincts, so a pattern that worked three times becomes a captured recipe instead of being re-derived from scratch every session. origin: continuous-improvement user-invocable: true --- # Skill Distillation — Turn Repeated Wins Into Reusable Instincts Law 7 says learn from every session. The friction harvester already learns from failures. This skill learns from the other side: when the same tool sequence keeps ending in a passing verification, that is a recipe worth keeping — not a coincidence to forget. ## When to Activate - At end of session, after a successful multi-step task — check whether the pattern is worth keeping. - When you notice you have solved a similar problem the same way more than once. - During a retrospective, to mine the observation log for patterns that have proven themselves. ## Core Concept Distillation walks the observation log, groups it into contiguous trajectories (split on session change or a long time gap), and keeps only the trajectories that ended in success: ``` verify-exit-0 — a Bash test/build/verify command with a non-failing output reflection-pass — an observation containing "verified" / "phase 4" / "verify:all green" ``` It then mines the tool-name sequences of successful trajectories for n-grams (length 3–5) that recurred **across multiple distinct sessions**. A pattern repeated only within a single session is rejected — that is repetition, not a reusable skill. ## The Promotion Ladder Drafts never affect behavior until you promote them. Three explicit steps, no auto-promotion: ``` 1. ci_distill_candidates — list patterns that qualify (read-only) 2. ci_distill_propose id= — write a DRAFT to ~/.claude/instincts//drafts/ (placeholder body — you fill in the real recipe) 3. — the tool sequence is evidence, not a recipe 4. ci_distill_promote id= — promote to a live instinct at 0.5 confidence (SUGGEST) ``` The draft starts at 0.4 confidence and lives in a `drafts/` subdirectory that the instinct loader ignores. Only `ci_distill_promote` writes a live instinct, at 0.5 (SUGGEST tier) — it suggests, it does not auto-apply, until the normal reinforcement loop earns it more confidence. ## Why Drafts, Not Auto-Instincts A tool sequence alone is cargo-cult evidence: `Read → Edit → Bash → Edit → Bash` is a TDD loop, but the *value* is in the preconditions and the specific steps, which the sequence does not capture. Requiring a human to edit the body before promotion is the guard against the system fabricating confident-sounding skills from coincidental call ordering. ## Limitations - **Pattern detection only (no LLM in v1).** The draft body is a placeholder; you write the recipe. An optional model-assisted body draft is a planned follow-up. - **Tool-name granularity.** Distillation sees tool names and summaries, not full intent. Two unrelated tasks with the same call shape will look like one pattern — the human edit step resolves this. ## Pairs With - **`continuous-improvement`** (core SKILL.md, Law 7) — distillation is the success-side complement to the friction-harvest failure side of the same observation log. - **`recall`** — before promoting, recall whether an existing instinct already covers the pattern. - **`tdd-workflow`** — the most common distilled pattern is the RED-GREEN-REFACTOR loop; promote it with project-specific test commands filled in.