¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Previously.

Problem statement: one of my skills, /pr-pass, was a hand-rolled loop — push, poll CI, fix a failure, re-push, repeat, bail after five iterations.

It works quite well, and it’s one of my most used skills.

That said, recently Claude Code shipped /goal (in v2.1.139), which is exactly that loop, packaging it as a primitive. So the skill was reimplementing something the harness now does natively.

In fact, most harnesses ship /goal natively these days.

We shall refactor!

/goal sets a completion condition. After each turn a fast model checks whether it holds; if not, Claude starts another turn on its own. It auto-clears once the condition is met. From the docs:

The /goal command sets a completion condition and Claude keeps working toward it without you prompting each step. After each turn, a small fast model checks whether the condition holds. If not, Claude starts another turn instead of returning control to you.

That deletes three things the old skill hand-built: the Monitor poll waiting on CI state, the “go back to Step 1” loop, and the max-5-iterations guard. The guard becomes a clause in the condition itself:

/goal every check on this PR has passed (gh pr checks shows no FAILURE
and no PENDING), or stop after 5 turns

One catch worth knowing before reaching for /goal: the evaluator (tester?) is a fresh model that only reads the transcript. It does not run gh or read files.

It does not call tools, so it can only judge what Claude has already surfaced in the conversation.

So the condition has to be something Claude’s own output demonstrates. The skill now says to paste the gh pr checks result into the reply every turn, so the evaluator has a CI state to judge against. Otherwise the goal would have never resolved thus it would have looped forever.

Another gotcha: /goal doesn’t touch permissions. Each turn’s git push still prompts unless paired it with auto mode.

The lesson generalizes past this one skill: whenever the harness grows a primitive, the custom code that predates it becomes technical debt. /loop, Stop hooks, and /goal now cover most of the “keep going until X” constructs I used previously.

🤖 Drafted with /bloggify.