SDLC Agent-Skill Wiki

stage-learn

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Stage: Learn

Canonical lifecycle stage: harvest the learnings from completed work — bugs, failed tests, reusable solutions, process lessons — and fold them into a durable, reusable form so future iterations start ahead. The output is not the shipped software (that is stage-release) but knowledge: a solution corpus, a retrospective’s action items, or an updated living spec. Its defining property is that its product is consumed by the front of the next loop — stage-align, stage-plan, and stage-review read it as grounding — closing the loop rather than ending it.

Derived projection — evidence is the capabilities that implements: [[stage-learn]].

New stage (promoted 2026-07-04); now beyond doubt — three frameworks (2026-07-05). Was folded into stage-release as its “learning close-out” flavor (BMAD-only, single-framework). Compound Engineering made learning capture a first-class, named step of its own loop (/ce-compound is “the money step… the whole point”), giving the activity a second framework and clearing the ≥2-framework bar the conventions require — exactly as stage-specify was split out of stage-plan. gstack (2026-07-05) is the third framework, and the first to populate both flavors at once: its Reflect sprint phase ships gstack-retro (team retrospective) and gstack-learn (an agent-grounding learnings corpus), plus gstack-skillify (compound a successful run into a permanent skill). Split cleanly out of release: release delivers the work; learn extracts the reusable knowledge. See Why a distinct stage. Superpowers (2026-07-17) is a fourth framework, purely in the capability-compounding flavor: sp-writing-skills turns a proven technique into a permanent auto-triggering skill (↔ gstack-skillify).

Why a distinct stage, not a flavor of release

stage-release finalizes and delivers a completed unit (ship-to-prod, or merge-the-spec). Learn does something categorically different: it treats the just-completed work as a source of training data and produces an artifact whose only purpose is to make future work better. The two are adjacent in time (both close the iteration) but opposite in direction — release points outward (to users / the trunk), learn points backward-then-forward (mine what happened → seed the next cycle). This is the loop-closing arrow that makes “compounding” possible; without it the lifecycle is a line, not a loop.

It is plausibly the first genuinely new SDLC stage the agent era adds — not a rename of a classic phase (align/plan/implement/validate/release all have pre-AI analogues) but an activity that only becomes first-class once learnings can be written in a machine-consumable form the next agent reads automatically. Traditional teams held retrospectives; few institutionalized the output as executable grounding. That is what changes here.

Compound Engineering:

BMAD:

gstack (both flavors — the third framework):

Superpowers (capability-compounding flavor):

  • sp-writing-skills — codify a proven technique into a permanent, auto-triggering skill (artifact-skill-doc) via TDD-for-documentation (baseline a subagent failing → write the skill → watch it comply); the library grows itself (pattern-knowledge-compounding). The direct counterpart to gstack-skillify — both make the agent gain a capability the learn output, rather than a lesson it reads.

Two flavors of “learn” in the evidence

  • Agent-grounding corpus (Compound Engineering; gstack). Machine-consumable learnings written where future agents auto-read them (artifact-solution-doc); the corpus itself is a maintained artifact (ce-compound-refresh) or a searchable cross-session store (gstack-learn
    • gbrain). This is the sharpest, most novel form. gstack and Superpowers extend it with capability compounding — gstack-skillify turns a successful run into a permanent skill, and Superpowers’ sp-writing-skills authors new auto-triggering skills test-first → artifact-skill-doc (the library grows itself).
  • Team-process retrospective (BMAD; gstack). A human-facing report extracting lessons and action items for future sprints → artifact-retrospective (bmad-retrospective, gstack-retro). The traditional agile form, agent-facilitated.

Same generic activity (harvest lessons → fold into a durable form that improves future iterations); different consumers (agents vs the human team). gstack is the first framework to ship both flavors.

Cross-framework equivalents

The learning-capture cluster: Compound Engineering’s ce-compound ↔ BMAD’s bmad-retrospective — both close the iteration by harvesting what was learned so the next one starts ahead. They are not set as equivalent_to edges: the terminal acts differ (a maintained agent-readable corpus vs a one-off human retrospective), like the release cluster’s deliberately-unclustered flavors.

Spec-flavored cousin in OpenSpec. openspec-sync merges a completed change’s artifact-spec-delta into the living spec so future work builds on it — arguably compounding knowledge at the spec level. It is kept under stage-release because its primary act is finalization (retire the change), not lesson extraction; noted here as the third angle on “fold what you learned back in.” If a framework ships a dedicated spec-learning step distinct from archival, revisit.

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