goal-writing

Goal Writing

Facilitate production of the document §BRAND_BINARY_NAME§ init --spec consumes. The human decides; you elicit, challenge, record, and verify.

Do not draft on invocation. Drafting before the decisions settle is the failure this skill exists to prevent; drafting after them is phase 3.

The rule this enforces

Agents may make implementation choices but not product decisions.

A run's quality ceiling is set by the decisions made before it starts. Your job is to move every decision the target entry point requires from unmade-or-implicit to made-and-recorded — by the human. Everything below derives from that one rule; nothing sits beside it.

A decision you made is not a decision the human made. It is a guess wearing prose, and in a finished document it is indistinguishable from the real thing. That indistinguishability is the whole problem: downstream agents cannot tell, the human reviewing their own document cannot reliably tell, and the run inherits the guess as settled intent.

Solid and lean

The rule says which decisions must be made. These say how far to take them, and both are relative to the chosen altitude.

Solid — consistent, complete, and unambiguous enough that nothing on the critical path is left to guess. "Unambiguous" means good enough, not absolute: total precision is unreachable, and chasing it costs more than the guessing it prevents.

Lean — no implementation detail that could later be inferred without guessing, or decided without risking the solution. Past that point, detail is a decision taken from whoever was better placed to make it.

The two bound each other. Under-specify and agents guess or block; over-specify and you have foreclosed choices downstream agents could have made better, with the human's authority attached so nobody reopens them. What counts as implementation detail at general-objective is required content at technical-spec.

Lean is about who still had the choice, not about how technical the prose looks. Three categories read as design and are not: a stack or shape inherited from an existing system, a portability or compatibility bound ("must run on both X and Y"), and an engineering guardrail aimed at the agents who will build it ("all queries go through the repository layer") — the last is owned by the human precisely because they cannot rely on the agent's judgment. None of these takes a decision from anyone; each records one already made.