Goals & Proposals
A goal is a desire with a clear place in your life. Initiatives and projects say what you’re working on; a goal says what success looks like — in a way an agent can actually check. Cohort also gives you a lighter place to park a want and a safe loop for agents to bring you ideas.
A goal carries three things beyond a title:
- A test — prose describing how you’d know it’s met (“login success rate stays above 99.9% for a week”).
- A metric (optional) — a number with a target:
current / target unit(e.g.820 / 1000 signups). - A verification record — who last checked the goal, when, whether it passed, and the evidence.
Goals fit into the work hierarchy: a goal can belong to an initiative, and projects can point at a goal, so tasks roll up to a measurable result.
Two kinds of desire
The Goals surface has two modes:
| Kind | Use it for | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Committed | An outcome you intend to pursue | It can have a test, metric, target date, and verification loop. It may be open, pending verification, met, or abandoned. |
| Someday | A want you want to keep visible without committing to it | Park a thought such as “Europe someday” with a trigger like “next time I’m near Berlin.” It never becomes overdue or appears as falling behind. |
Use New Goal with the Someday kind to park a want quickly. A someday desire can remain unsatisfied until you decide otherwise; its language is about being satisfied or let go, not about failing.
Status
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
open | Active — being pursued, not yet met |
verification_pending | An agent reported the goal met; a human needs to confirm |
met | Verified complete |
abandoned | No longer being pursued |
Verifying a goal
This is what makes goals more than a label. An agent (or a human) can verify a goal — submitting whether it passed and the evidence behind that call. How a passing verification resolves depends on a workspace setting:
| Mode | An agent’s passing verification… | A human’s passing verification… |
|---|---|---|
| Propose (default) | moves the goal to verification_pending for a human to confirm | marks it met |
| Autonomous | marks it met directly | marks it met |
In propose mode, the goal’s detail page shows a verification card — who reported it met, the evidence, and Confirm / Reject buttons. Confirm marks the goal met; reject sends it back to open. This keeps a human in the loop on “done,” the same principle as the agents-can’t-mark-tasks-done rule.
Agents can’t set a goal’s status directly. They report a verification (pass/fail + evidence); the status change follows from the workspace’s verification mode.
The proposal loop
When an agent finds something relevant to an open desire, it can file a proposal instead of acting silently. Every proposal includes:
- What it recommends and why now — a justification connecting it to the desire.
- Evidence — the observations or receipts behind the recommendation.
- Plan — what approval would make happen, plus tools used, tools still needed, honest cost, confidence, and an optional expiry.
There are three proposal kinds:
| Kind | What the agent is asking to do | Approval result |
|---|---|---|
| Action | Recommend concrete work or an opportunity | Creates a linked project and tasks from the plan. |
| Capture | Park a desire inferred from a conversation | Creates the desire as a visible draft for you to review. |
| Disclosure | Share a proposed redacted description externally | Stamps the approved publicShape on the desire. |
The publicShape is a privacy boundary: it is the only text an agent may share externally for that desire. A disclosure proposal must be approved before that text can be used.
You always decide what happens next:
- Approve the proposal.
- Approve with edits, which records the edits and uses them to steer future proposals.
- Decline with an optional reason: not now, not this, or never this kind. A “never this kind” decision is added to the goal’s guidance log.
- Discuss in a comment thread, including @-mentions, before deciding.
Proposals collect on the goal and appear in the briefing digest. The workspace setting Proposal delivery controls whether they arrive in the briefing or immediately; an expiring proposal can still interrupt when it would otherwise miss the next briefing. Open proposals are capped at three per goal, and each agent can file up to ten per day.
How to use it
Park a want
On Goals, choose New Goal and set the kind to Someday for a short thought such as “Europe someday.” Add a trigger if there is a useful condition for surfacing it. There is no deadline to maintain.
Review a proposal
Open the proposal on its goal. Read the justification, evidence, plan, tools, cost, confidence, and expiry. Approve it, edit it before approving, decline it with the kind of “no” you mean, or discuss it in the thread.
Teach through declines
Use never this kind when a category should not come back, and explain why. That reason becomes standing guidance on the goal. Use not now when timing is the issue, or not this when this particular recommendation misses the mark.
In the dashboard
The Goals page lists your goals with their status and metric progress. Open a goal to edit its title, test, metric, target date, and linked initiative — and, when one is pending, to confirm or reject a verification.
For agents
Agents work with goals two ways:
- The
cohort_goaltool — fetch a goal to read its test and metric, or submit a verification (passed,evidence, and an optional updated metric value). - The
cohort_proposetool — file an action, capture, or disclosure proposal with its justification and at least one piece of evidence. Agents can propose, but resolving a proposal is human-only. - The REST API — full CRUD plus a verify endpoint. See the Goals API.