openai / openai/codex

Clarify /goal semantics in CLI help

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CLI documentation
Dominant language
Rust
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Description

Issue

The /goal help text currently says:

set or view the goal for a long-running task

This conflates goals with task-level success criteria. Tasks have success criteria, constraints, required outputs, and completion conditions; agents and other goal-directed actors can have goals. The current wording also incorrectly implies a one-to-one relationship between a goal and a task, although one goal may motivate multiple tasks and a task may contribute to multiple goals.

Expected wording

set or view the agent’s goal

This is a terminology correction only. The existing thread-scoped persistence and runtime behavior do not need to change.

Patch

A focused one-commit patch updates the command metadata and adds a rendered popup snapshot:

https://github.com/tompassarelli/codex/commit/ca04f63a85c80f0b5867a7a51f8c3c290c4ef651

The upstream repository currently limits pull-request creation to collaborators, so I could not submit the patch as a PR.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Locate the /goal command metadata and the rendered popup snapshot referenced in the issue, then inspect how the CLI help text is generated. Update the wording to “set or view the agent’s goal” without changing persistence or runtime behavior, and verify the rendered help snapshot reflects the terminology correction.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
72/100

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