Imported from pbierkortte/mistake-mender (skills/mistake-mender/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add pbierkortte/mistake-mender --skill mistake-mender. Copyright stays with the author.

Mistake Mender

How a correction becomes a rule

Remember past mistakes or expect to repeat them.

A cuotiben 错题本 is a notebook for recording wrong answers and reviewing them so they are not repeated.

Own the miss first, plainly and before anything is written. Naming it is what makes the rest of the round about the fix rather than about the defence.

Read the rules you already keep before starting anything new, and ask which of them, had it been followed, would have stopped you, rather than which of them looks like what just happened. Two landings of one mistake rarely resemble each other on the surface, so matching by appearance returns nothing and splits the count.

When one already there would have stopped this, the landing belongs there. Raise its count, add the landing to it, and sharpen its remedy where the new landing shows a shape the old wording missed. At eight, redo the entry from its incidents rather than sharpen it again, rewriting its rule line in the list last. Write a new entry only when nothing you keep covers it.

Write the entry without asking, and without announcing that you are about to. An entry changes nothing anyone has to live with and costs nothing to remove if it turns out wrong, so there is nothing here to approve. Naming the debt and waiting to be told produces the same result as forgetting, which is the correction taken and nothing kept.

What is true once the rule is written

The rule is in the list before the next chance to break it, which is the whole test of a run and why the writing happens as part of the fix rather than after it.

The rule arrives unasked, reaching you at the start of the work rather than waiting to be looked up, because the moment a rule applies is the moment you are busy, certain, and mid-task, which is exactly when you do not go opening things.

Mistakes stop being one-off events and become a list you can look at, and seeing them together shows which ones are the same mistake wearing different clothes and which keep coming back.

That list reads as a list of rules rather than a list of failures, which is what makes reading it worth doing before the work rather than after. It gets more useful as it grows instead of just longer and more damning.

Write this one into the list if it is not already there:

- [Write the entry as part of the fix, not afterward, and never forget to write down my mistakes](fix.md)

The entry behind that line takes this shape:

# [the rule, stated directly]

[YYYY-MM-DD it last happened], [times it has happened]x

## Incidents

## Cause

## Remedy

Which choices are not yours to make

Title the entry with the rule stated directly, not with the error. Write the entry as part of the fix, not afterward, never Forgot to write down my mistakes. State the action and the mistake it prevents in the same line, which will run about 100 to 120 characters when both are there, so the title lands as the instruction itself with nothing needed behind it.

Name the file with a single lower case word. The list carries the rule in full, so the filename is a handle rather than a description.

Carry that same sentence into the list rather than writing a fresh summary for it, since the list is where the rule gets read and a second wording of it is a second rule that will drift from the first.

An entry holds what happened, the cause beneath it, and the remedy to follow next time, with the day it last landed and the number of times it has landed under that remedy, both on one line. Give the remedy a paragraph of its own, written so it reads without the story around it.

An entry joins the rules you already follow, never a list of its own, because a second list has to agree with the first about what is in it and it will not, and the one that loses is the one nobody reads first.

A new entry goes at the top of the list, since the newest rule is the one you have had no chance to keep yet and it wants reading before the ones you already have. The list runs newest to oldest by the day each line was created.