pi-skills/openspec/changes/archive/2026-06-10-goal-driven-loop/proposal.md

Why

Long-running coding sessions drift. The user states a goal, the agent works on it, gets sidetracked, and loses sight of the original target. When context compaction occurs, the goal may be forgotten entirely. Pure skill-only designs force user interaction at every checkpoint, which breaks the "set and forget" intent.

What Changes

• Add a Pi skill goal-driven-loop that detects goal-setting phrases (Chinese, English, other languages), persists goal + acceptance criteria to .agents/goal/GOAL.md, and runs an instruction-based loop iterating until all criteria pass or genuine stagnation is detected
• Add a Pi extension goal-driven-loop that automates trigger detection, state injection on every agent turn (resists context compaction), context tension detection via ctx.getContextUsage(), timed auto-default confirms (eliminates user-interaction hang-ups), and automatic delegation to comet for coarse-grained goals
• Auto-generate verifiable acceptance criteria when not provided by the user
• Per-iteration exponential backoff retry (10 retries, ~37min coverage) for transient failures
• Dual-signal stagnation detection with auto-recovery injection before user notification
• Deslop pass and clean exit on completion

Capabilities

New Capabilities

• goal-driven-loop: Goal persistence and iteration loop with acceptance criteria verification, trigger/anti-trigger detection, state injection, and automatic retry/recovery

Modified Capabilities

Impact

• New files: .pi/skills/goal-driven-loop/ (skill instructions + error-handling reference), .pi/extensions/goal-driven-loop/ (4 TypeScript modules + package.json)
• Runtime: Extension subscribes to input and before_agent_start events
• State: .agents/goal/GOAL.md created per-project during active goals, deleted on completion
• Dependencies: Pi Extension API (@earendil-works/pi-coding-agent), node:fs, node:path
• Integration: Delegates to comet-open for coarse-grained goals; no changes to comet itself