goal-writer

goal-writer is a skill for Claude Code from NicholasSpisak/goal-writer. It costs 118 tokens per session (3,490 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A skill that writes a short goal document and a longer rider document for one round of autonomous coding-agent work. The goal states the task and checks; the rider contains detailed plans, data rules, tests, and boundaries.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare portable work briefs for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or a human reviewer, including the required work, reading order, verification, and stopping point.
Why use it?
It turns a broad coding request into instructions an agent can follow and verify across a defined work cycle.

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 portable work briefs for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or a human reviewer, including the required work, reading order, verification, and stopping point.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nicholasspisak/goal-writer/goal-writer
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 NicholasSpisak/goal-writer --skill goal-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NicholasSpisak/goal-writer

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-writer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nicholasspisak/goal-writer/goal-writer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicholasspisak/goal-writer/goal-writer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicholasspisak/goal-writer/goal-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nicholasspisak/goal-writer/goal-writer/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-writer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicholasspisak/goal-writer/goal-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nicholasspisak/goal-writer/goal-writer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 118 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,490 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.
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 $0.00118 $0.03490
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.01745
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00698
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00349

Measured 12d ago against content hash 628a57517941, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

goal-writer 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/validate_pair.sh), 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.

skills/goal-writer/SKILL.md · 294 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 294 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Goal Writer

Two documents brief one round of autonomous agent work:

  • Goal — the spine, hard-capped at 4,000 characters: what to do, what to read first, the posture, the verification, the stop condition. Small enough to paste directly into /goal in Claude Code or Codex.
  • Rider — the prescriptive detail, unbounded (typically 10–35 KB): data schemas, phase plans, named depth tests, verb signatures, error footers, out-of-scope lists.

The pair is portable: the same two files brief Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, or a human reviewer without modification. The slash command is the runtime; the pair is the spec. The pair compounds; the slash command does not.

The pair is also primitive-agnostic. A loop is an agent repeating cycles of work until a stop condition is met, and /goal is one of four loop types (turn-based, goal-based, time-based, proactive). /goal is this skill's primary runtime, but the same two files feed a turn-based verification skill, a scheduled /loop, or a proactive routine without a rewrite — see references/harness-goal-commands.md. Start with the simplest loop that fits the task.

This skill is project-agnostic. Substitute the project's own toolchain commands wherever the templates say <project's ... command>.

When to use

  • The user is starting a new round of agentic work and wants goal+rider files written into the project's docs/goals/ (or equivalent).
  • Right scope: one feature, two to five files, half a day to a day of agent runtime.

When NOT to use: fifteen minutes of polish, a hot-fix, or a tiny PR — a five-line CSS tweak doesn't need eleven phases. The overhead only amortizes against rounds that would otherwise run hours of agent time.

Soft prerequisites — check, and tell the user what's missing:

  1. An architecture / AS-BUILT doc and a CHANGELOG. If absent, offer to write a minimal AS-BUILT first (one round, one rider, one phase).
  2. A fast test lane (~30 seconds). If the suite takes 40 minutes, the phase loop breaks down.

Read the full file on GitHub · 294 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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 · 294 lines · 118 tokens per session scan A 628a57517941

Subscribe to this mod's changes

goal-writer is a skill published in the GitHub repository NicholasSpisak/goal-writer (7 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 118 tokens to every session and 3,490 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-31.