Goal

What is a Goal

A goal is a target or objective an agent, or a coordinated fleet of agents, is working toward, tracked over time rather than scoped to finish inside a single run. This is the distinction that separates it from a plain task: a task is usually sized to complete in one session, while a goal can reasonably take several sessions, several handoffs, and several different approaches before it is actually reached.

Because a goal can outlive any one session's context window, pursuing one seriously requires something that survives between sessions to track where things stand: a tracked task board, a progress file, a handoff note, a checkpoint. Without that, each new session working toward the same goal would have no way to know what already got tried, what worked, and what is genuinely still left, and would risk re-deriving or even repeating earlier work from scratch.

A goal does not require any particular mechanism to pursue it. It can be worked on by one long session, by a self-paced loop that checks in periodically, by a fixed-interval cron job, or by a fleet of agents each handling a different piece. What makes something a goal rather than a task is the scope and the time horizon: it defines what success ultimately looks like, not how any single run gets there.