goal

goal is a skill for Claude Code from melodic-software/claude-code-plugins. It costs 178 tokens per session (1,737 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for defining a performance goal with an exact metric and command, plus realistic and ideal targets. It calculates the unavoidable minimum cost before any code changes are made.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to decide what performance success means, check whether a target is reachable, and choose whether to change the target or the optimization target.
Why use it?
It reveals early when a target is below the system's measured floor and therefore cannot be reached through code changes alone.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Part of the performance plugin — 4 skills shipped together

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install performance, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills.

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/goal.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/goal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/goal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/goal.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 178 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,737 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 5.1 $0.00178 $0.01737
Opus 5 $0.00089 $0.00869
Sonnet 5 $0.00036 $0.00347
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00174

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2492ecce5496, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 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.

plugins/performance/skills/goal/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Answers "what would count as done, and is it reachable at all?"

The failure this prevents: the source run behind this plugin set a goal of p50 <= 250 ms for a hook on a host that charged 0.3-2.8 s for a single irreducible process spawn. The goal was unreachable by any code change, and that was discovered at the end, after the work. Knowing it up front would have reframed the entire task from "make it fast" to "remove the spawn or accept the floor".

Human-gated, always

This phase requires the user. /performance:snapshot and /performance:verify may run unattended; this one may not, under any autonomy setting.

The reason is specific: computing the floor routinely produces a verdict the user has to act on ("this target is unreachable"), and choosing between a reframed goal, a different target, and accepting the floor is a judgment about what the work is for. An agent resolving that on the user's behalf converts a surfaced constraint back into a silent one.

If the user is unavailable, stop and say what is blocked. Do not pick a target and proceed.

What a goal must contain

1. The metric, and the exact command that produces it

Not "latency". The literal command, its arguments, and the field of its output that is the number. A metric nobody can re-run is not a metric.

Name the drift-immune counter alongside it (spawns, syscalls, queries, allocations, round trips) and rank the counter above the duration. On a host that cannot support a wall-clock claim, the counter is what survives; in the source run the durable result was a spawn census of 4 -> 1, and the milliseconds were not reproducible by an independent verifier on the same machine an hour later.

2. The floor, computed before any work

The irreducible cost this target cannot go below whatever the code does. Compute it by measuring the cheapest possible version of the operation: the empty hook, the no-op spawn, the single round trip, the query returning one row.

lib/spawn_noise.py's spawn_probe() gives the process-spawn floor for this host directly.

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 2d ago First seen · 134 lines · 178 tokens per session scan A 2492ecce5496

Subscribe to this mod's changes

goal is a skill published in the GitHub repository melodic-software/claude-code-plugins (15 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 178 tokens to every session and 1,737 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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