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I've been using /goal in Codex way more than /plan lately, and the results are noticeably better.
I dug through the source a bit. The mechanism is pretty straightforward.
At its core, /goal wraps the normal agent loop in another loop: a goal loop.
In a normal turn, the stopping condition is: the model decides it can now reply, so it stops calling tools. The turn ends there.
But “the turn is over” does not mean “the task is done.”
This matters a lot for longer tasks. The model may have checked part of the problem, gathered some evidence, and started wrapping up, while the full objective still needs more validation, edge-case handling, or cleanup.
/goal separates those two things: ending the current turn, and actually completing the goal.
When you run /goal xxx, Codex persists that goal in the current thread.
Then, whenever an agent turn finishes and the thread becomes idle, if the goal is still active, Codex automatically starts another turn. It injects a hidden reminder into the prompt:
what the current goal is; keep making progress; don’t narrow the scope; rely on current state and verifiable evidence; check before finishing; and once the goal is truly complete, call update_goal complete.
So in normal mode, once the model stops calling tools, the turn stops.
In goal mode, Codex re-injects the goal and the audit requirements after each turn, pushing the model to keep checking, advancing, and verifying.
The loop only ends when the model explicitly calls update_goal complete.
One important detail:
Codex does not automatically distill the previous conversation into the goal.
What gets persisted is mainly the text you wrote in /goal. If that text is vague, like “finish this task,” the model may have less useful context later, especially after context compaction.
So the better habit is to write the goal concretely.
If the goal comes from a long discussion, ask Codex to summarize it into a clear task description first, then start /goal with that.
You can also specify a token budget, though in daily use I rarely bother. Codex tracks how many tokens and how much time the goal used, and can report that when it finishes.
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