draft-goal-condition

Variables

Arguments: $ARGUMENTS — the natural-language intent for the autonomous run, plus any constraints or bounds the user volunteers.

Purpose

Turn a stated intent into a paste-ready /goal <condition> string that conforms to the shape the official Claude Code docs prescribe and provably fits the documented character limit. A language model cannot reliably count characters, so length conformance is decided by a deterministic counter, not by estimation.

The /goal contract — its condition shape and its character limit — can change between Claude Code versions. This skill therefore reads the current official docs at authoring time and never bakes those values into its own text. The number you see in a doc today is not a constant to memorize.

Step 0 — Lever fit (is /goal even the right tool?)

/goal starts the next turn when the previous one finishes and stops when a fresh evaluator model confirms a completion condition holds. Before authoring, confirm that fits the intent. If it does not, route instead of drafting:

• Interval-driven ("every 5 minutes", "poll until") → /loop (a time interval starts each turn), not /goal.
• Cloud / sessionless / scheduled ("nightly", "each morning", runs with no session open) → routines / /schedule (labelled research preview at the time of writing — check before recommending it).
• Custom per-turn logic across all sessions (deterministic script check, settings-scoped) → a prompt-based Stop hook.
• More agents than one conversation can coordinate (or the orchestration is worth codifying as a rerunnable script) → a dynamic workflow. Unlike the rows above, this one is not exclusive of /goal: a workflow decides how a single task fans out, /goal decides when to stop turning, and the two compose — the goal sets the hard completion requirement while the workflow performs the parallel work. Route away from drafting only when the intent wants the fan-out and no across-turn completion condition; when it wants both, draft the condition here and say the workflow rides alongside it.
• One-shot (a single prompt with no across-turn continuation) → just prompt; no goal.