goal

Goal

Emit a single objective statement the reader can act on with no other context. Print it and stop. This skill produces one artifact and takes no other action.

Run it at any point: mid-task, before a handoff, after a pivot, in a scratch directory with no repository. It never blocks on state it cannot find.

Scope

In: one goal statement body, under 4000 characters, printed to the user. Direct invocation wraps it in a ## Goal statement header (Step 5); the body itself never contains a heading.

Out: file writes, commits, git or gh calls, network access, plan edits, task updates. The single command this skill runs is the wc -m measurement in Step 4, which reads from a heredoc and writes nothing. If you find yourself running anything else, stop — that belongs to /handoff, not here.

Step 1: Determine focus

If an argument was supplied, it is the focus. Treat it exactly as /compact's hint: a steer on what matters, not a full specification. Honor exclusions in it literally — "ignore the docs work" means no docs criterion, even if docs work is unfinished.

With no argument, derive focus from these sources, highest weight first:

1. The most recent pivot. Where the work changed direction, scope, or approach — a correction, a rejected approach, a new constraint. The current objective lives after the last pivot, not at the top of the session.
2. Unfinished plan items. Resolve the plan file from the most recent ## Plan File Info: block in a <system-reminder> — match [^[:space:]]+/\.claude/plans/[^[:space:]]+\.md and take the latest. Read it and collect unchecked - [ ] items. No such block means no plan file; skip.
3. Open tasks. Call TaskList; keep entries whose status != "completed".

Skip any source that is absent. All three absent is normal and fine — derive the goal from the conversation alone.

Where sources disagree, the conversation wins. A plan file records what was true when written; the session records what is true now.