Reflection Stage Design
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Reflection Stage Design

Reflection Stage Design Purpose Every project produces knowledge. Without a structured capture, that knowledge disappears when the session ends. The Reflection stage makes learning first class — agents reflect on what happened, Mindy synthesizes it, and the result writes permanently to BezelBrain. Every future project starts smarter. Lifecycle Position Refle...

Purpose

Every project produces knowledge. Without a structured capture, that knowledge disappears when the session ends. The Reflection stage makes learning first-class — agents reflect on what happened, Mindy synthesizes it, and the result writes permanently to BezelBrain. Every future project starts smarter.

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Lifecycle Position

`` Design → Plan → Build → Reflection → Launch ``

Reflection is the fourth named stage in every project. Build does not close until Reflection completes. Launch does not open until Reflection closes.

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1. Phase Check-ins (during Build)

After each Build phase closes, every agent who worked that phase posts a short structured note as part of phase close. This is not a separate dispatch — it is the final step of closing a phase.

Format: 3-5 lines per agent, structured around the five categories (see below). Included in the task output_ref — same mechanism as any other task output, no new infrastructure needed.

Owner: Each agent. No orchestration needed.

Storage: Mindy reads each output_ref as phases close and appends the check-in to the living project context document. These accumulate across all phases and become the source material for the project synthesis.

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2. Project Synthesis (the Reflection stage)

After Build completes, Mindy opens the Reflection stage. This is the full retrospective.

Flow:

`` Build completes ↓ Mindy opens Reflection stage ↓ Reflection tasks dispatched to all agents (parallel, depends_on: []) ↓ Each agent reads their phase check-ins, reflects across the full project, posts task.complete with output_ref ↓ Synthesis task fires (depends_on: [all reflection tasks]) Mindy reads every output_ref, synthesizes across five categories ↓ Exec gate — Justin reviews synthesized document Justin may add his own perspective before it commits ↓ Final document writes to BezelBrain + project HCS history topic Reflection stage closes ``

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The Five Categories

Every agent reflects across the same five categories. Mindy's synthesis organizes the final document around these.

| # | Category | What it captures | |---|---|---| | 1 | What we did well | Patterns, decisions, and approaches to repeat | | 2 | What we can improve | Process gaps, communication failures, handoff friction | | 3 | What would make us better | Tools, integrations, workflow changes that would have helped | | 4 | What we learned from mistakes | Wrong decisions — wrong scope, wrong architecture, wrong interpretation | | 5 | Errors and corrections | Specific moments: tried X, it failed, Y was the correct approach |

Category 5 is the most concrete and the most valuable over time. It accumulates into a library of tried-and-failed paths with proven corrections — future agents load this and skip the mistake entirely.

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Agent Roles

All agents who participated in the project receive a reflection task. Tasks run in parallel.

| Agent | Reflects on | |---|---| | Quinn | Code decisions, implementation errors, patterns found or missed | | Vikram | Architecture decisions, review findings, things caught late that should have been caught in Design | | Priya | Spec quality, missing acceptance criteria, gaps that caused Quinn to post blocked | | Zara | UX spec completeness, components that needed revision after Quinn started | | Luna | QA failures, acceptance criteria that were ambiguous or untestable | | Mindy | Project management — task graph accuracy, blocking events, plan changes, dispatch decisions |

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Synthesis Document Structure

Mindy produces one structured document per project:

``` Project: [name] Date: [ISO date] Agents: [list] Phases completed: [N]

What We Did Well
[synthesized across all agents]
What We Can Improve
[synthesized across all agents]
What Would Make Us Better
[tools, process, communication]
What We Learned From Mistakes
[synthesized across all agents]
Errors and Corrections
[specific pairs: tried X → Y was correct]
```

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