/retro silently produces empty/misleading output when 'today' anchor is wrong (no stale-base warning)

[poppinpixels]

Failure mode

When /retro runs on a worktree-style setup (Conductor, etc.) and the agent's understanding of "today" is off by enough days, the skill silently produces a clean-looking retro that misses recent reality. The git log --since="<midnight-aligned-start>" window quietly returns zero or near-zero commits, but nothing in the output flags that the window is wrong.

Both inputs to the window can be wrong:

1. "today" anchor drift — the agent computes today from session-context cues that don't match the actual system date (model error, session-reminder mismatch, etc.).
2. Stale worktree base — the Conductor/claude/... branch is days/weeks behind origin/<default>, and although the skill does git fetch origin <default> --quiet, nothing surfaces that the latest commit is materially older than "today" would suggest.

Either way, the retro renders successfully, the metrics table looks legitimate, and the user gets a confidently-wrong report.

Reproducer

I hit this on a real project today:

• today per system date: 2026-05-20
• Agent computed today (incorrectly): 2026-05-15
• /retro (default 7d): analyzed --since="2026-05-08T00:00:00", returned 18 commits (all from May 8-11), missed 4 commits on origin/main from May 19-20 including the latest version bump
• Output: a clean retro narrative ending "Streak: 0d (4-day burst May 8-11)" — looks coherent, completely missed v0.21.0 → v0.22.0 work that had already shipped

The user caught it only when version-bumping for the next PR: "version number is way old."

Why it's silent

Step 1: Gather Raw Data runs git fetch origin <default> --quiet and then immediately starts gathering commits via git log origin/<default> --since="<window>". There's no sanity-check on the gap between "today" and origin/<default>'s latest commit. If the gap exceeds the window length, the window is empty — but the retro keeps going and the model fills in narrative from whatever (possibly zero) commits it found.

Suggested fix (sketch)

Inject a stale-base sanity check right after the fetch, before the data-gathering. Always echo the latest commit date + gap so the agent has the data point; escalate to an explicit warning when the gap is suspect:

git fetch origin <default> --quiet

_LATEST_COMMIT_TS=$(git log origin/<default> -1 --format="%at" 2>/dev/null || echo 0)
_LATEST_COMMIT_DATE=$(git log origin/<default> -1 --format="%ad" --date=short 2>/dev/null || echo unknown)
_GAP_DAYS=$(( ($(date +%s) - _LATEST_COMMIT_TS) / 86400 ))
echo "ORIGIN_<default>_LATEST: $_LATEST_COMMIT_DATE (${_GAP_DAYS}d before today)"
if [ "$_GAP_DAYS" -gt 3 ]; then
  echo "⚠ STALE-BASE WARNING: latest commit is ${_GAP_DAYS} days before today."
  echo "  If your window is shorter than ${_GAP_DAYS}d, the retro will contain few or zero commits."
  echo "  Sanity-check the 'today' anchor against the actual system date before proceeding —"
  echo "  a clean-looking retro on the wrong window silently misses recent reality."
fi

Plus a prose follow-up after the bash block: "If the stale-base warning fires: confirm that today matches the system date, and that origin/<default> actually has the recent activity you expect. If the gap exceeds the window length, the retro will report empty or near-empty results — that's evidence the anchor or fetch is wrong, not that the team didn't ship."

Always echoing the data point (even when no warning fires) gives the agent a fact to cross-check against. The 3-day threshold is comfortably above typical weekly cadence (so weekend gaps don't false-positive) but low enough to catch the 9-day case I hit. The threshold is debatable — could be window-aware (e.g., gap > window_days) if the skill exposes the parsed window length as a bash var.

Why I'm filing an issue instead of a PR

I have a working local patch (tested against the repo where the bug surfaced) but want to confirm with you whether:

• The 3-day threshold is right, or whether it should be window-aware
• The warning text matches gstack's voice/conventions
• This belongs in Step 1: Gather Raw Data or as its own pre-flight step before Step 1
• The fix should also apply to /retro compare and /retro global (the global mode has its own multi-repo discovery — the same failure mode could occur there)

Happy to send a PR shaped however you'd prefer. Context: hit while running /retro from a Claude Code (Conductor) worktree branch that was 4 commits behind origin/main.

---

If helpful: the lesson also landed in my local project memory as "high-confidence 'obviously fine' moments are exactly when the second pair of eyes catches the thing that isn't" — same pattern across the stale-base miss, a self-judged bug diagnosis, and a /ship declaring-done gate where I skipped the advisor. The /retro skill is the most fixable of these because the check is mechanical.

[xg-gh-25]

This is a nasty silent failure mode. When the "today" anchor is wrong, /retro should fail loudly rather than generating misleading empty output.

Root cause hypothesis:
The stale-base check probably assumes git log --since will error out, but it silently returns empty when the date parsing succeeds but is semantically wrong (e.g., future date, or timezone mismatch causing no commits in range).

Impact:

• User thinks "no work happened" when actually the date filter is broken
• No warning that the base assumption is violated
• Could lead to missing critical work in retrospectives

Suggested fix:
Add a pre-flight check:

# Before running retro
commit_count=$(git rev-list --count --since="$TODAY_ANCHOR" HEAD)
if [ "$commit_count" -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "⚠️  WARNING: No commits found since $TODAY_ANCHOR"
  echo "    Current HEAD: $(git log -1 --format='%h %ci')"
  echo "    Please verify your TODAY anchor is correct"
  exit 1
fi

This would catch:

• Future dates
• Timezone mismatches
• Malformed date strings that parse but don't match reality

Would you like me to submit a PR with this guard rail?

[jbetala7]

Opened PR #1636 to add /retro date/window sanity checks and warnings: #1636

[poppinpixels]

Issue author. Four questions from #1624 I don’t see resolved in #1636

• Threshold: fixed 3d, or window-aware (gap > window_days)?
• Scope: does this extend to /retro compare and /retro global? Global mode’s multi-repo discovery has the same failure mode.
• Placement: Step 1 inline, or dedicated pre-flight?
• Reproducer: tested against the 9-day-gap case in /retro silently produces empty/misleading output when 'today' anchor is wrong (no stale-base warning) #1624, or a synthetic empty-window?