define-goal

Define Goal is a lightweight reasoning-discipline skill that helps an agent turn a fuzzy user intention into a concrete, measurable objective before any implementation work begins. The problem it addresses is that agents often start executing against vague requests like "make checkout faster" or "keep investigating," which have no stopping condition and lead to aimless effort. This skill forces the objective to name a specific outcome, the artifact or system involved, how completion will be verified, and what is in and out of scope.

The workflow first confirms that goal definition is actually needed, then restates the likely goal in concrete terms, makes it quantitative where the domain supports it (pass/fail validators, quality thresholds like latency or error rate, artifact constraints, evidence counts), and repairs weak or pure-activity goals before setting them. It checks existing goal state via a `get_goal` call and only creates a goal with `create_goal` once the objective passes an explicit quality bar that answers what will be true, what evidence proves it, what threshold defines success, and what should cause the agent to stop and ask. The skill deliberately excludes durable snapshots, decision logs, ledgers, and resume files.

It is aimed at agent builders and users of the Codex/OpenAI goal tooling who want objective-driven execution, and at anyone who wants an agent to negotiate a crisp definition of done rather than grinding. Typical use cases include scoping bug fixes as reproduce-then-fix objectives, bounding PR review-comment resolution, and converting performance requests into benchmarked targets.