the-goal

the-goal is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from glebis/claude-skills. It costs 184 tokens per session (1,820 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A diagnostic method for finding the main bottleneck in a workflow before choosing what to automate. A bottleneck is the part of a system that limits how much work can get through.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for deciding what to automate, identifying the highest-impact constraint, and reviewing whether existing automations address the real problem.
Why use it?
It prevents effort being spent automating tasks that do not improve the result because another constraint still limits progress.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Good fit It is for deciding what to automate, identifying the highest-impact constraint, and reviewing whether existing automations address the real problem.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/glebis/claude-skills/the-goal
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.

Any agent
npx skills add glebis/claude-skills --skill the-goal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/glebis/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for the-goal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/glebis/claude-skills/the-goal/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/glebis/claude-skills/the-goal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/glebis/claude-skills/the-goal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/glebis/claude-skills/the-goal/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for the-goal

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/glebis/claude-skills/the-goal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/glebis/claude-skills/the-goal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 184 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,820 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00184 $0.01820
Opus 5 $0.00092 $0.00910
Sonnet 5 $0.00037 $0.00364
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00182

Measured 8d ago against content hash 44d04af28fcc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

the-goal 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 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/recommend_rung.py, scripts/score_constraints.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

the-goal/SKILL.md · 80 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 80 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The Goal — constraint-first automation

Named after Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal. The lesson this skill encodes: a local optimum is not a global one. Automating something that feels productive but is not the system's constraint produces no throughput gain. Most wasted automation effort dies here. This skill finds the constraint first, then points exactly one automation at it.

When to use

Use before building anything, and during reviews:

  • "What should I automate?" / "Where do I point my agents?" / "What's the highest-leverage thing right now?"
  • The user is about to build a Claude Code skill, Goal, loop, schedule, or workflow and isn't sure it matters.
  • The user has a pile of half-useful automations and feels busy but stuck.
  • A periodic review of where agent effort is going.

If the user already knows their constraint with confidence and just wants to build, skip the diagnosis and go straight to Step 4 (elevate) and the Recommendation.

The core distinction (state this early)

Three ways an automation idea fails, worst first:

  1. It targets a non-constraint. The worst kind. Even a flawless automation here adds zero throughput; the bottleneck still caps the system. Cut it.
  2. It optimizes a local metric. Feels productive (inbox zero, faster research) but the global goal does not move.
  3. "Felt busy" is not "moved the needle." Activity is not throughput. Require a measurable throughput before recommending anything.

Workflow — the Five Focusing Steps

Run as an interactive diagnostic, one focused question at a time. The LLM's job is to elicit the picture and map it to structured inputs; two scripts then do the ranking and the rung selection deterministically, so the core calls aren't free-form vibes. Load references/five-focusing-steps.md for the full method, definitions (throughput / inventory / operating expense in knowledge-work terms, drum-buffer-rope, Herbie) and example walkthroughs.

Optional — cenno mode. If cenno is available and the user prefers panels (or asks to "ask me in panels"), collect the inputs through cenno instead of chat: choice 0–3 (or a custom a2ui 0–3 slider) for the ordinal scores, confirm for necessary_condition/policy_gate and the seven rung facts, text for the goal/throughput. The answers feed the same two scripts unchanged. Load references/cenno-mode.md for the control mapping, ask_sequence batching, and how to persist the analysis. Fall back to chat if cenno isn't running — never block.

Read the full file on GitHub · 80 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 8d ago First seen · 80 lines · 184 tokens per session scan A 44d04af28fcc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

the-goal is a skill published in the GitHub repository glebis/claude-skills (375 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 184 tokens to every session and 1,820 once invoked, about $0.0009 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 2026-09-03.

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