AI Skills

Go from a rough idea to a merged PR without leaving your terminal.

GoalPath's AI skills teach your coding assistant a structured development workflow: discover what to build, plan the work, implement it, and track progress — all while keeping GoalPath updated for your stakeholders.

The Pipeline

Skills form a pipeline. Each step produces the input for the next:

You can enter the pipeline at any step. Have a PRD already? Skip straight to Plan. Have planned items? Jump to Implement or Work.

Installation

1. Install the skills plugin

In Claude Code, run:

2. Verify

If you see your assigned items, you're set.

Discover: Idea → PRD

Start with anything — a phrase, a URL to a barebones milestone, or a half-formed thought:

Your assistant acts as a product sparring partner. It won't just agree with you — it challenges scope, surfaces assumptions, and forces trade-offs:

• Probes the problem before jumping to solutions
• Researches competitors and best practices on the web
• Checks your codebase for what already exists and what's feasible
• Drafts a PRD and iterates with you until it's sharp

The result is a GoalPath milestone with a focused, opinionated PRD — not a vague feature list.

What the PRD includes

• Purpose and primary outcome — the single thing that's true when this ships
• Success metrics — how you'd know it's working
• Design principles — opinionated rules that guide decisions
• Core sections — broken into logical phases or components
• Non-goals — what you're explicitly not building
• Open questions — things deliberately left undecided, with context

Plan: PRD → Items

Pass a milestone URL and your assistant breaks the PRD into work items:

The planning skill:

• Explores your codebase to understand what exists and what needs building
• Proposes items with types (Feature, Task, Bug), fibonacci estimates, subtasks, and dependencies
• Resolves ambiguity during planning — every item created is ready to start immediately
• Creates items in GoalPath after you approve the breakdown

Items are ordered by implementation priority: backend before frontend, dependencies before dependents, risk before routine.

Estimation rules

Only Features get estimates. Tasks, Bugs, and Deadlines don't.

Implement: Milestone → PR

Hand off an entire milestone for implementation:

Your assistant creates a feature branch and works through every item:

1. Plans the order — backend first, dependencies first, risky work first
2. Delegates to specialist agents — data model, backend logic, frontend, tests
3. Checks off subtasks as work completes — stakeholders see real-time progress in GoalPath
4. Flags decisions that need your input — but keeps working with reasonable defaults, doesn't block
5. Verifies build and tests pass
6. Opens a single PR with all milestone work

The result: one branch, one PR, one migration (if applicable). GoalPath items are updated throughout — not batched at the end.

How your assistant communicates during implementation

Your assistant won't wait for you to respond to a highlight — it continues with its best judgment and documents the assumption. You can course-correct asynchronously.

Work: Single Item → Code

Pick up one item instead of a full milestone:

Handles the full lifecycle:

1. Sets status to Started — the team sees work has begun
2. Explores relevant code for context
3. Implements with appropriate specialist agents
4. Checks off subtasks incrementally
5. Verifies build and tests pass
6. Sets status to Finished and posts a summary comment

If the item was previously Rejected, your assistant reads the rejection comments to understand what needs fixing, then re-implements.

Status: Quick Check

Shows your assigned items grouped by urgency:

1. Blocked / Needs Attention — items with Question, Blocked, or Discussion highlights (shown first)
2. In Progress — Started items with subtask completion counts
3. Ready to Start — NotStarted items in priority order
4. Recently Finished — completed but not yet delivered

Ends with a summary line and a suggested next action:

2 in progress | 4 ready | 1 blocked | 14 total points in flight

Suggested: The "API auth" item has a Question highlight. Resolve it before starting new work.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Skills

Use the pipeline

The skills are designed to flow into each other. After Discover finishes, it suggests Plan. After Plan finishes, it suggests Implement. Follow the pipeline for the smoothest experience.

Keep items small

The Plan skill targets 1-3 point items. If you find yourself with many 5s and 8s, ask the planner to split them further. Smaller items mean faster feedback loops and more accurate progress tracking.

Let highlights work for you

When your assistant flags a Question or Blocked highlight, it shows up immediately in GoalPath for your team to see. You don't need to be in the terminal to respond — answer in GoalPath and the assistant picks it up next time it checks.

Check off subtasks as you go

Skills check off subtasks incrementally, not in a batch at the end. This means stakeholders watching in GoalPath see real-time progress. If you're working manually (without skills), do the same — it makes a real difference for stakeholder trust.