Loose ends. git status clean? PRs merged, watched, or handed off? bd in_progress = 0 or justified? A dirty tree at session end is lost work — same for an unwatched PR.
Hand-rolled mechanics → codemod candidates. Every ad-hoc script, jq pipeline, or multi-step shell one-liner written this session is a signal: if the mechanics are general, bro should own them. File a bd gap bead (title says the missing command, body quotes the one-liner that had to be invented) — or implement it if the surface already exists. Example that made this real: a hand-written agents.json prune script → bro-k7a1 (bro fleet agents prune missing).
Call economy. Count the calls that repeated one pattern — N bd closes, N gh api fetches, N status polls. If one bro command could batch them, that is the same kind of gap bead.
Lessons. Persist what this session learned — a dry-run alone stores nothing. bro self learn capture --dry-run previews what finished artifacts would distill — capture has no session filter, so a plan that is all this session's gets stored by rerunning bare capture; otherwise store just this session's insight with bro self learn add --lesson "…" --on … --evidence …, so the next session starts smarter, not just the next human.
Debt sweep. PRs merged this session → bro review debt collect picks up reviewer findings left unresolved. Never leave them to rot.
State assertions. Verify from authoritative checks, not memory: gh pr view for merges, git worktree list for cleanup, bd show for beads. A watcher exit is a state to inspect, not silence.

Policy

Scale to the session. A one-shot Q&A that touched nothing skips with a single line — retro is a review, not busywork. A session that wrote code, merged PRs, or spawned agents does the full pass.
Beads, not prose. Findings land as bd items — never as a paragraph the user has to convert into work themselves.
The guard is the doorbell, this skill is the room. The retro-on-stop guard fires the one-line nudge; this checklist is what "ran the retro" actually means.

retro

retro — session-end retrospective

Checklist