Hone

The law this skill runs on: a grade nobody acts on is a diagnosis with no treatment. /grade-session writes a candid report card every session, /harvest files it — but nothing ever edits the skill that earned the bad grade, so the suite repeats the same failure forever. hone is the feedback wire: it reads the accumulated coach/agent notes, finds the failures that RECUR, and sharpens the skill body that caused each one. It hones PATTERNS, not incidents — one bad grade is noise; the same bad grade twice is a defect in the instructions.

Three hard invariants (this is what keeps hone from becoming taste, capitalize, or burn):

• It edits skill BODIES only — the procedural steps/rules in ~/.claude/commands/*.md. A project FACT goes to /burn rent (never write CLAUDE.md here); a user PREFERENCE goes to /taste (never write TASTE.md here). Cross a lane and you've duplicated another skill.
• Propose, write only on approval. Every edit is surfaced as a unified diff + its grade evidence before anything is written. Never auto-edit a skill. Surgical hunks only — add a guard step, tighten a rule, fix a default; never rewrite a body.
• Recurrence-gated. A skill is honed only for a failure seen across ≥2 sessions (the same promote-on-second-occurrence bar capitalize/taste use). A one-off stays watched, not actioned.

/hone sweep (default)

Run the full loop: grades in, approved skill edits out.

1. Gather the graded report cards. Spawn a subagent so only the extracted grades — not the full summaries — hit main context. It reads the newest N (default 5) private/session_summaries/*-summary.md, pulls each # Session Evaluation block (the two grade tables + Coach Note + Agent Note), and the feedback-type entries in ~/.claude/projects/<slug>/memory/MEMORY.md. Returns: per session, the sub-A grades with their one-line notes, plus both notes verbatim. If fewer than 2 graded sessions exist, stop and say so — there is not enough signal yet (run /harvest to accumulate it).
2. Cluster into recurring failure modes. Group the low grades + notes by the UNDERLYING failure (e.g. "over-read into main context", "review missed state-machine edges", "asked a question it could have answered"), not by wording. Keep only modes that recur across ≥2 sessions; everything else is reported as watched, not actioned.
3. Route each cluster by lane — do NOT cross lanes:
   • a recurring skill-method failure (the skill's own steps/rules permitted it) → hone's lane (step 4).
   • a re-learned project fact → hand to /burn rent. a taste/preference signal → hand to /taste. Name the handoff; write neither file yourself.
   • a one-off or fuzzy note → leave it; list it under "watching".
4. Map to the target skill + draft the smallest edit that closes it. For each in-lane cluster, find the skill .md whose step or rule would have prevented the recurrence, and draft the minimal surgical change — a new guard step, a tightened rule, a corrected default. Never a rewrite. (hone MAY target its own body; if so, flag it loudly.)
5. Gate every proposed edit on the four-part promotion gate — Reusable (helps beyond the one session), Non-trivial (the skill genuinely lacked it), Specific (a concrete step/rule, not "be better"), Verified (traceable to ≥2 dated grade moments). Reject the rest with reasons.
6. Propose, then write only what's approved. Show each edit as a unified diff against its skill + the grade evidence (which sessions, which exact notes drove it). Apply only the approved hunks. Report: applied (path + the failure it closes), rejected (reason), handed off (to /burn or /taste), watching (sub-threshold).

/hone audit

The read-only backlog — the flat-learning-curve check for the skill suite itself. Run steps 1–3 of sweep, then STOP: list each recurring failure mode with its recurrence count + the sessions, the skill it implicates, and its lane (hone edit / →/burn / →/taste / watching). Propose and write nothing. Use this to see whether grades are actually feeding back, or whether the same complaint keeps recurring un-fixed.

/hone <skill-name>

Scope the sweep to one skill: gather only the grade moments that bear on <skill-name> (its name, its outputs, the work it ran), then run steps 2–6 for that skill alone. Use when one skill keeps under-delivering and you want to sharpen it now without a full sweep.

Rules

• Patterns, not incidents: never edit a skill from a single session's note. A defect is recurrence (≥2 sessions); below that it is watched, not written.
• Lane discipline: hone writes ONLY skill-body method/logic. Project fact → /burn rent; user preference → /taste; the grades themselves are /grade-session's and are read-only canonical input — never re-grade, re-live, or edit the archive.
• Propose-on-approval, surgical, reversible: always surface the unified diff + evidence; write only approved hunks; smallest change that closes the failure; never rewrite a whole body. (~/.claude/commands/ may be outside git — the diff IS the safety record, so keep edits inspectable.)
• Self-edits are announced: an edit to hone.md itself is allowed (it is the point) but must be flagged explicitly, never slipped in.
• Honest empty result: if nothing clears the recurrence + four-part gate, say so and write nothing. A manufactured edit is worse than none.
• Quality is the constraint, not the variable: every edit must make the skill catch a real recurring failure; never trade a skill's correctness or clarity for brevity.