Goal Swarm

Own the requested outcome through its finish line. The parent chooses useful next actions, integrates results, and accepts the whole. A goal is the outcome to achieve; native goal tracking is optional. Honor the user's scope, agent limits, permissions, and effort budget.

Use this strategy only when the user explicitly requests Goal Swarm, a swarm, or sustained pursuit of a goal. Ordinary delegation uses Orchestration.

Form the goal

Use Reframe to form a new goal from the user's request, project context, and settled decisions. Reuse a current brief that already establishes the goal. A precise request needs only a concise confirmation; uncertain framing needs the deeper pass that the task warrants.

Keep the resulting brief in the existing task record and use it to guide execution and acceptance. Reframe returns the brief here; this workflow keeps ownership and continues authorized work without a routine approval checkpoint. Ask for material user decisions under the shared acceptance guidance.

Reuse the settled brief through attempts and resume. Revisit it when new evidence or user direction challenges the framing; preserve explicit requirements and obtain authorization for material scope or tradeoff changes. Grow evaluation as discovery reveals risks, using Verify's acceptance guidance.

Choose solo work or bounded workers

Use Orchestration for model selection, assignments, isolation, concurrency, task lifecycle, recovery, and integration. Work solo when the work is cohesive or splitting adds waiting and coordination.

For useful parallelism, partition required outcomes, compare independent approaches to the same outcome, or mix both. Before dispatch, state how results will be selected and which coverage is required. A race can end with one acceptable result only when it satisfies the whole requested brief. Use Arena when candidate synthesis is the task.

Assign each worker through Orchestration's self-contained brief, including its bounded outcome and evaluation. Workers use their relevant task skills; they need no native goal object or separate Goal Swarm invocation. Further delegation requires the parent's permission. Completing a losing experiment can satisfy a worker's assignment without completing the parent outcome.

Learn, retain progress, and adapt

Choose the next action from what prevents success and what the last attempt established. Explore uncertain approaches reversibly. Measure the bottleneck before performance changes. Reach for original inputs, stronger instruments, or useful methods from another field when they can resolve the remaining gap. Use Architect for consequential design decisions.

Evaluate meaningful results against the outcome and preserved constraints. Preliminary findings guide discovery; accepting a change needs suitable evidence. Inspect the artifact and decisive evidence rather than relying on a worker's summary. Missing coverage, failed workers, or evidence for the wrong artifact or method leave a gap to repair or report. A failed candidate does not remove its required slice from the parent goal.

Retain supported progress separately from unproven experiments. Reject regressions in required behavior even when the headline target passes. A correct improvement that misses a hard target is progress, not completion. Keep the target intact while changing approaches; stronger methods do not authorize new scope or tradeoffs. Repeating equivalent attempts is not progress. When evidence establishes a limit needing a user decision, explain the gap and ask.

Keep enough context in the existing task record to resume: accepted results, remaining gaps, decisive evidence, and the next useful action. Record comparison conditions where claims depend on them. On resume, reconcile the latest user decisions, artifacts, and pending tasks before continuing, applying the acceptance guidance to evidence affected by changes. Delivered commits, PR layers, and rollout stages retain their required checks, per Outcome-Oriented Execution.

Deliver and report

Evaluate the final integrated result using the agreed criteria. Use Verify for real product workflows. For a PR finish line, PR owns review, publication, CI, feedback, and fixes; use pr yolo only for an explicitly requested merge. For local code or agent-procedure changes, use Review Fix Loop when its trigger applies. Pass evaluation criteria, decisive evidence, and gaps into the existing review.

Finish only when the requested outcome, relevant constraints, evaluation, and delivery state are satisfied. Intermediate progress or exhausted effort is not completion of an unmet goal. Honor a requested pause. Report what was accepted, what remains unfinished, evidence and artifacts, and the requested next decision. Account for every required worker outcome; a dropout or missing check is not a pass.

Native tracking and continued execution

When the user explicitly requests native goal tracking, use it if exposed by the current host and follow its lifecycle and budget instructions. Keep native state consistent with the actual outcome. Without native tracking, pursue the same outcome through ordinary work and task records. If requested tracking or unattended continuation is unavailable, report that limitation and continue useful authorized work without claiming the missing capability.

An instruction to persist guides an active run; wakeups and continued execution need runtime support. Use the host's supported continuation mechanisms within the request's authorization. This skill alone creates no recurring schedule or separate top-level conversation.