pqrst-practice/INTENT.md

Intent

Why this repository exists

Agentic coding sessions end without a closing move. Work stops when the task is done, the context window fills, or attention moves elsewhere. What the session was — where the engineering attention actually went — evaporates with the transcript.

This repository provides the means of closing an agentic coding session: a short, standard, retrospective act performed at the end of a bounded unit of work, producing one durable, comparable record.

The instrument is PQRST — a forced 100% allocation of the session's effective engineering effort across five stable dimensions: Problem, Quality, Research, Security, Task organization.

The problem being addressed

An individual session is legible while you are in it and opaque a week later. Across many sessions the questions that matter are process questions, and none of them can be answered from transcripts:

• Is research effort on this repository falling as its documentation improves, or not?
• Do sessions that spend more effort coordinating than building fail more often, or merely cost more?
• Are we shipping implementation with no verification behind it, and paying for that in later bugfix sessions?
• Does security work appear where the task class says it should?

Existing telemetry — tokens, wall-clock time, tool-call counts, diff size — measures consumption, not character. A session can burn a large budget on reconstructing an undocumented request path and produce three lines of code; another can spend the same budget implementing a well-specified feature. Consumption metrics cannot tell those apart. PQRST is a judgment, deliberately, because the thing worth recording is a judgment.

What we intend PQRST to be

A lens, applied consistently, whose value accumulates in aggregate.

1. Retrospective, never prospective. The estimate is produced after the work. A session must never be steered toward a target signature. The moment PQRST becomes something to hit, it stops describing anything.
2. Coarse and honest. Five-point increments and a stated confidence beat invented precision. A defensible P30 Q20 R30 S0 T20 at low confidence is worth more than a fabricated P31 Q19 R28 S2 T20.
3. Auditable. A signature without its dominant-factors sentence is not a record. Numbers are the index; the evidence is the content.
4. Stable. The five dimensions do not change, so that records made a year apart remain comparable. Detail is added by expanding a letter into subdimensions, never by growing the acronym.
5. Diagnostic, not evaluative. There is no good profile. An exploration session is R-heavy; a hardening session is Q-heavy; a credential integration is S-heavy. The question is always whether the mix fits the class of task.

What we intend it not to become

• Not a productivity score. PQRST does not rank developers, agents, models, or teams. Raw percentages carry no verdict, and using them as one destroys the honesty the practice depends on.
• Not telemetry. It does not reconstruct time, tokens, compute, or tool calls. Cost measures may be stored alongside a record; they may never substitute for one.
• Not a planning tool. No session is designed against a PQRST budget.
• Not a completeness ritual. A zero is information. A dimension inflated so the record "looks thorough" poisons every trend it enters.

The measure of success

This repository succeeds when a session can be closed in under a minute; when the resulting record is still meaningful six months later; and when accumulated records change something real — a document that gets written because research effort refused to fall, a workflow that gets fixed because coordination effort kept dominating routine changes.

It fails the moment anyone tries to score well on it.

Related documents

• SCOPE.md — what is and is not in this repository
• spec/PqrstEstimationPractice.md — the specification, v0.1
• PqrstPrompt.md — the canonical end-of-session prompt