goal-brief

A command that turns a rough goal into a structured contract for the `/goal` command, including completion checks, evidence, permissions, constraints, and starting files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a measurable coding task, record what the agent may do, and specify how completion will be verified.
Why use it?
It makes vague requests precise before work begins and separates assumptions from confirmed facts. You can review and approve the contract without starting execution.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/missingpackage/nightshift/goal-brief
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MissingPackage/nightshift
Per session 20 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 370 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00020 $0.00370
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00185
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00074
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00037

Measured yesterday against content hash 516715a918d2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

goal-brief scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/goal-brief.md · 32 lines

What it actually says

Take my raw goal below and draft the structured goal contract I will feed to /goal. Do NOT start executing the goal — the deliverable of this command is the contract text, printed for my review.

Draft it in exactly this shape, filling gaps with your best inference from the repo state and flagging every inference with [ASSUMED] so I can correct it:

GOAL: <one sentence, outcome not activity>

DONE WHEN (all measurable):
- <condition 1 — verifiable by a command/artifact, not by judgment>
- <condition 2>

EVIDENCE OF DONE: <exact commands/artifacts that will prove each condition>

AUTHORITY GRANTED:
- may do autonomously: <e.g. create branches, open PRs, run tests, spend up to €X>
- must docket (never do): <e.g. merge to dev, touch deploy repo, change public APIs, delete >30-day-old code>

CONSTRAINTS: <standing rules that apply — attribution, protected paths, budget, conventions>

WORKING PROTOCOL: follow skills loop-iteration + done; verifier gate per cycle; digest every cycle; stop-by-design when the remaining work is docket-gated.

CONTEXT ANCHORS: <files to read first: HANDOFF.md, tracker query, specs>

Rules for the draft: split heterogeneous objectives into separate goals (a goal with "and also…" chains loses its completion condition); reject any DONE-WHEN that a verifier could not check mechanically — rewrite it until it is checkable; keep AUTHORITY explicit even when it feels obvious — implied authority is how unwanted merges happen.

Raw goal: $ARGUMENTS

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 32 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 516715a918d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

goal-brief is a command published in the GitHub repository MissingPackage/nightshift (2 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 370 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.