goal-writer

Guidance for turning a rough intention into a precise goal for autonomous work. A goal states the required result, how to prove it, where work may happen, and when the agent should stop.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to draft or refine goal-mode objectives, completion checks, boundaries, evidence requirements, and stop rules.
Why use it?
It removes ambiguity about what completion means and reduces the chance that an autonomous run continues beyond its intended scope. It also separates agreeing on the wording from starting the goal.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/autohandai/code-cli/goal-writer
Any agent
npx skills add autohandai/code-cli --skill goal-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,172 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 $0.00056 $0.01172
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00586
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00234
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00117

Measured 2d ago against content hash eb2250a04d77, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

goal-writer 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 2d ago.

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.

src/skills/builtin/goal-writer/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Write a good goal

Help the user turn a rough intention into one or more /goal objectives that goal mode can pursue across many turns without supervision. A goal is not a task description; it is a completion contract. It says what must become true, how that truth is proven, where the work may and may not reach, and when to stop and report.

Drafting and starting are separate steps. Settle the wording first. Only once the user has approved the exact objective should you call create_goal. When the user approves more than one objective, call create_goal for each approved goal in the intended order; the first starts and the rest are queued.

Ask, do not narrate choices

When a decision has concrete options, use the host's user-question tool if it is available. Do not write a prose menu and ask the user to answer in free text.

Examples of choices that should use the tool:

  • narrow vs broad scope
  • which proof command to use
  • whether to include a budget
  • which budget size
  • which permission mode or execution mode to use

If no user-question tool is available, fall back to a short plain-text question with clearly labeled options and wait. Open-ended questions are fine in prose.

Rules

  • Only help when the user asks for goal-writing help. Do not wrap ordinary work in goal mode on your own.
  • Write the draft in the user's language.
  • Always show the full drafted objective before starting it.
  • Get explicit approval before calling create_goal.
  • Draft with the user. Offer a draft, explain the choices, invite changes, and revise.
  • If the user wants a looser goal after you point out the trade-off, write their version. Do not keep relitigating it.
  • Do not set a token budget unless the user asks or the work is clearly open-ended enough that a budget is useful.
  • Never bake a turn cap into the objective text.

What makes a goal good

Strong goals define proof, not effort.

Include as many of these as the task warrants:

  1. End state: the concrete condition that must become true.
  2. Proof: observable evidence, preferably a command, test, search, file, or metric.
  3. Boundaries: what may be touched and what is off limits.
  4. Loop: how to iterate, such as rerunning a check after each change.
  5. Stop rule: when to stop and report instead of forcing a pass.

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 125 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A eb2250a04d77

Subscribe to this mod's changes

goal-writer is a skill published in the GitHub repository autohandai/code-cli (181 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 1,172 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-30.

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