goal-rider-author

goal-rider-author is a skill for Claude Code from hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills. It costs 106 tokens per session (4,296 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A paired-document format for briefing a future coding-agent session: a short goal states the objective, while a rider contains detailed instructions and checks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare a project goal and its supporting rider for another agentic coding turn.
Why use it?
It keeps the main brief compact while preserving the detailed plan, data rules, verification steps, and boundaries the next agent needs.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it to prepare a project goal and its supporting rider for another agentic coding turn.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/goal-rider-author
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 hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills --skill goal-rider-author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

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 goal-rider-author

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/goal-rider-author/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/goal-rider-author)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/goal-rider-author"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/goal-rider-author/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 goal-rider-author

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/goal-rider-author"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/goal-rider-author.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 106 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,296 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
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to low

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • low Excessive Agency · line 283
    Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.
    Fix: Limit the skill's scope to its documented purpose. Remove instructions that enable the agent to perform actions outside its stated functionality.
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 $0.00106 $0.04296
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.02148
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00859
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00430

Measured 12d ago against content hash 8d6050a99052, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

goal-rider-author 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 12d 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.

skills/goal-rider-author/SKILL.md · 420 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 420 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Project: SpecStory, Inc. / goal-rider-author. "Draft a goal+rider document pair to brief the next agentic turn on a project."

License: Apache License 2.0. Full license text is in LICENSE alongside this file.

Snapshot: Frozen copy of Greg Ceccarelli's published skill as of 2026-07-18. The maintained version lives upstream and may have evolved since this snapshot.

Goal & Rider Author

A two-document pattern for briefing an autonomous coding agent (Claude Code, Codex CLI, or any agentic harness) on the next round of work. The goal is the ≤4000-char spine: what to do, what to read first, the posture, the verification, the stop conditions. The rider holds the prescriptive detail: data schemas, phase plans, depth-test names, verb signatures, error footers, out-of-scope lists.

The pattern's superpower is that the goal stays small enough to paste into a Codex /goal or a Claude run prompt, while the rider can be arbitrarily detailed without bloating the executor's working memory.

This skill is project-agnostic. It works for any codebase that has a docs/goals/ (or equivalent) directory, conventional commits, and some form of AS-BUILT / architecture doc. Substitute the project's own toolchain commands wherever the templates say <project's ... command>.

When to invoke

The user is about to start a new round of agentic work and wants goal+rider files written into a project's docs/goals/ directory. Triggers include "draft a goal that addresses X", "write a goal+rider for Y", "new goal for the next agentic turn", "rider for X".

Pre-work — do not skip

Before drafting, gather context. Read in this order, skipping items the project doesn't have:

  1. Project architecture docAS-BUILT-ARCHITECTURE.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/architecture.md, or whatever the project uses. Look for a "what's shipped vs thin" section if one exists; it grounds the goal in reality.
  2. Prior goal+rider pairs in docs/goals/ (or wherever the project keeps them). Their invariants compose forward; do not duplicate verbatim. Skim the most recent two pairs to absorb voice and section conventions.
  3. Recent commits: git log --oneline -30 -- docs/goals/ and git log --oneline -30. Reveals delivery cadence and the conventional-commit format the project uses.
  4. Source code at HEAD for any data structures, file paths, or function names you'll quote in the rider. Verify they match HEAD before citing.
  5. Research or pain-point reports the project has (e.g., unmet-needs, user-research, retro docs). They ground the ergonomics in real pain.

Read the full file on GitHub · 420 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 12d ago First seen · 420 lines · 106 tokens per session scan A 8d6050a99052

Subscribe to this mod's changes

goal-rider-author is a skill published in the GitHub repository hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills (67 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 106 tokens to every session and 4,296 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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