Self Improving Skills Review

Codex Self-Improvement Review

Use this skill to decide whether a recent interaction should update Codex's reusable skills. Treat skills as procedural memory: they record how to do a class of task, not one-off facts.

Review Policy

Inspect the current thread evidence before writing anything. Then walk this ladder and act on the EARLIEST rung that applies (Hermes review-priority order):

1. Patch a skill that was in play this session. If a skill was loaded or

invoked ($skill-name) during this thread and it turned out wrong, stale, or incomplete — that is the skill to fix first. It routed the work, so its gaps are exactly what future sessions will hit.

1. Extend an existing relevant skill. Prefer adding the gotcha, corrected

step, or example to a skill that already governs this class of task over creating a new narrow sibling.

1. Embed the corrected preference in the governing skill. User corrections

about workflow, tone, formatting, or verification belong in the body of the skill that governs that class of task — so the next session starts already corrected.

1. Create a new skill — last resort. Only when the learning is class-level

and likely to recur, and no existing skill covers it.

Additional rules:

• Name anti-patterns (a bad name means the knowledge is not class-level —

fall back up the ladder or capture nothing): a PR number, an error string, a session label like fix-X / debug-Y, a bare library name with no technique, anything tied to one instance.

• Duplicates: report, don't merge. If you notice two skills covering the

same ground, note it in your output — consolidation is the $codex-skill-curator pass's job, not the review's.

• Do not encode transient errors that resolved within the session (if a retry

worked, the lesson — if any — is the retry pattern, not the failure), missing binaries, one-off paths, temporary outages, or negative claims like "tool X does not work". Setup failures are capturable only as the FIX (install command, config, env var).

• Never edit bundled/system/admin skills. Work in user or repo skill roots only.
• Keep changes small, make a backup first, and report the diff summary.

Authoring Standards

• description is ONE short sentence stating the capability. After writing

it, count the length yourself and trim BEFORE saving — long descriptions bloat skill discovery and degrade routing (the store warns above ~200 chars and hard-rejects above 1024).

• Record only commands, flags, and paths you actually ran or observed in this

thread — never invent plausible-looking ones.

• Never write environment-derived identity (OS username, email, git config)

into frontmatter fields such as author — skills get shared, and that is a privacy leak the user never opted into.

Tooling

Prefer the plugin MCP tools when available:

• codex_skill_list
• codex_skill_view — also unlocks patch/write for the viewed file

(read-before-write guard: editing an existing file you never viewed in this session is rejected; view first, then edit using the returned content)

• codex_skill_create — pass reason to record why the skill exists
• codex_skill_patch
• codex_skill_write_file
• codex_skill_archive
• codex_skill_curate
• codex_skill_backups / codex_skill_rollback — list backups and restore

one by exact backup_id (the rollback itself is undoable)

• codex_skill_scan — advisory secrets/injection scan of one skill
• codex_self_improvement_status

If the MCP server is not active, run the local helper script from this plugin:

python3 ../../scripts/skill_manager_cli.py status
python3 ../../scripts/skill_manager_cli.py list
python3 ../../scripts/skill_manager_cli.py curate --dry-run

Resolve script paths relative to this SKILL.md location.

Output

If no durable improvement exists, say so briefly. If you changed a skill, report:

• skill name
• action taken
• backup id
• short reason

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: UniM0cha
• Source: UniM0cha/self-improving-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.