goal

goal is a skill for Claude Code from svy04/ballast. It costs 69 tokens per session (1,930 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured workflow for completing a large or unfamiliar goal by identifying its foundations, learning missing basics, and checking each result. It can be used in any field, including software and business work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Breaking down a major goal, checking existing resources, learning prerequisites, recording open questions and decisions, and verifying that the finished work meets its definition of done.
Why use it?
It prevents a project from being built on guesses or unverified assumptions. It also records decisions and solved paths so later work can reuse them.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ballast plugin — 16 skills, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Breaking down a major goal, checking existing resources, learning prerequisites, recording open questions and decisions, and verifying that the finished work meets its definition of done.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/svy04/ballast/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 svy04/ballast --skill goal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/svy04/ballast

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ballast, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills, 4 hooks.

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/svy04/ballast/goal.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/svy04/ballast/goal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/svy04/ballast/goal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/svy04/ballast/goal.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,930 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 $0.00069 $0.01930
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00965
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00386
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00193

Measured 8d ago against content hash 4500b8c93490, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, 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 8d 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/SKILL.md · 81 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Goal engine

Premise: don't trust what you already think you know. Big goals rarely fail loudly — they fail quietly, on foundations that were guessed instead of verified. This pipeline replaces confidence with structure. It is domain-agnostic: a marketing campaign, a codebase, a field you have never touched.

Phase 0 — Intake

  • Restate the goal and its definition of done, one line each. Confirm only what is genuinely the user's to decide: direction, taste, budget, deadlines, and who a deliverable is for. Tools and order are yours — do not ask about them.
  • Check what already exists before planning to build anything: prior art, standard tools, the user's own assets. Adopting beats rebuilding.
  • Ensure the memory structure exists (run brain-init if not). From here on, decisions are recorded the moment they happen, and unresolved items are registered, not remembered.

Phase 0.5 — Mobilize (summon what you already hold)

A goal never starts from zero: by the time it arrives you already hold rules, recorded decisions, verified notes, and skills. This phase exists because of a real, quiet failure: work can proceed competently from a blank page while the exact knowledge it needed sits unread in a file — knowledge held but not summoned degrades the result as surely as knowledge missing.

  • Split the goal into branches that do not overlap and together cover the whole of it (MECE). Keep this coarse — a handful of branches, not a skeleton; Phase 2 does the fine cutting.
  • For each branch, write down what it needs to be done well.
  • Judge each branch against what already exists: the rules catalog, memory/knowledge/, the decision ledger, existing skills. Where an asset exists, using it is mandatory — open it now and let it steer the branch, don't defer it to "later". Where nothing exists, learning is that branch's first task, and it enters the terrain scan first.
  • Leave a mobilization table the user can glance at: branch · what it needs · what's held (with the file) · gap → first move.

Read the full file on GitHub · 81 lines

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 · 81 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A 4500b8c93490

Subscribe to this mod's changes

goal is a skill published in the GitHub repository svy04/ballast (71 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 1,930 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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