# Pectra Retrospective

Source: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/pectra-retrospective/22637
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Pectra-Retrospective?index=0x679387a7d856c905ad75ccffa1c7b33ad9a1350a92e771bad8edc0cf0cc96781ad78109f
Submitted by macbudkowski.eth on 2025-01-24 UTC, 1 upvote, 0 comments

## Summary

This is a call for retrospectives on AllCoreDevs (ACD), the Ethereum core developer process, following the Pectra upgrade and recent criticism of the process. The post asks participants to share reflections and improvement proposals in a dedicated thread, with responses categorized by Client Teams, Infrastructure Providers & Developers, and Misc. Users / Community members. It suggests questions on what went better or worse than expected, what to start, stop or change, and which "legacy process debt" to rethink from first principles. It also cautions that efficiency gains, such as those from speed, can trade off against security, openness and reducing "unknown unknowns."

## Article

Pectra Retrospective

On ACDC#149, we agreed that before jumping into Fusaka planning, we should stop and reflect on Pectra. More broadly, we’ve recently seen many questions, strong criticism and novel improvement proposals related to AllCoreDevs (ACD).

To keep the conversation tractable, I’d suggest using this thread as a coordination point to share retrospectives and analyses of ACD, as well as proposals for how to improve things. While it’s fine to highlight problems without necessary having a solution to them, hopefully we can keep the conversation civil and productive

I’ll use this top post to categorize high-quality responses from Client Teams, Infrastructure Providers & Developers, and Misc. Users / Community members.

In a few weeks, we’ll dedicate time on ACD to discuss what came out of this discussion.

While I don’t want to overly constrain how feedback is provided, here are suggested starting points for reflection:

Over the past year, what went better than expected in Pectra’s development and/or ACD generally? What caused this?

Over the past year, what went worse than expected in Pectra’s development and/or ACD generally? How could we have prevented this?

Looking forward, what should we start doing, stop doing and/or do differently?

What should we not compromise on, even if there is pressure to do so?

What parts of ACD are “legacy process debt”, which we should consider rethinking from first principles?

As we discuss this, we should deeply consider the second-order impact of proposals. For example, it’s often suggested that ACD should be “more efficient”. On the surface, no one would disagree. That said, it’s easy to see how there’s a tension between speed and other aspects of the process, such as security, openness and biasing towards work that has less “unknown unknowns”.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try and make the process more efficient, but that we should be mindful of what we tradeoff to get those efficiency gains.