manual-correction-implies-skill-gap
Manual Correction Implies a Skill Gap — Fix the Artifact, Not the Brief
Section titled “Manual Correction Implies a Skill Gap — Fix the Artifact, Not the Brief”When you catch yourself injecting knowledge into a teammate brief, spawn prompt, or correction message that should already live in a skill, agent definition, or rule — STOP and fix the underlying artifact before the next teammate spawns. Patching the brief alone perpetuates the gap: every future spawn re-discovers the same blind spot, and every future session pays the same correction tax.
This is the strict form of development-principles.md § “Update Skills After Every Error”. That rule fires on an error; this one fires on a correction you applied successfully — which leaves no error behind to trigger it, and so goes unrecorded.
Triggers
Section titled “Triggers”The same warning written into 2+ briefs in one session · a constraint re-explained to a teammate you already explained it to · a correction to a teammate’s output that is a recurring pattern rather than a one-off · a teammate emitting [t1k:skill-bug …] / [t1k:lesson …] about a wrong or incomplete skill body · checkpoint-memory advice future sessions need that the canonical skill does not carry.
Required action
Section titled “Required action”Edit during the work, not at wrap-up. Deferring loses the context that made the gap visible, and the edit then does not happen.
Narrow exceptions
Section titled “Narrow exceptions”A single-use session-specific decision (plan content, not skill content) · a fact that changes per project (belongs in the plan file) · the skill IS the artifact you are already editing this turn — finish the in-flight edit, don’t recurse.
Full details
Section titled “Full details”5-step action procedure (identify canonical artifact → edit it → re-spawn/re-message → sync-back → issue when non-trivial), full trigger list, anti-patterns, session evidence, and history: docs/manual-correction-implies-skill-gap.md.
Related
Section titled “Related”development-principles.md § “Update Skills After Every Error” (generic ancestor) · prefer-local-over-global-edits.md · kit-wide-fix-discipline.md · skills/t1k-sync-back/SKILL.md § “Pre-flight Step 0 — Kit-Freshness Guard” · telemetry.md