Goal Lifecycle

Goal Lifecycle

Contract

Iron law: no lifecycle.status transition without an audit-trail entry — the goal file changes only through bin/flow-goal-record.sh --update-lifecycle, and every transition writes a goal-created (draft → active) or goal-evaluation journal artifact. Invoked by /flow:goal create, /flow:start Phase 1, and /flow:debug for draft → active after goal-contract-capture; by /flow:goal pause | resume | clear; after /flow:goal evaluate confirms a terminal verdict; and by goal-evaluator for non-terminal updates. Inputs: goal id, from-state, to-state, reason, trigger (evaluator | command | hook | user). Returns the new status once the write and the artifact both succeed. Permitted skip: the run event when scope.run_id is unset. Nothing else.

State machine

Non-terminal: draft, active, and the resumable waiting_for_user, waiting_for_ci, blocked. Terminal and immutable: achieved, failed, cancelled — new work needs a new goal id. The allowed-transition table with triggers, the disallowed transitions, and the last_evaluation.result mapping live in references/goal-lifecycle-transitions.md; bin/flow-goal-record.sh enforces the same table and refuses anything outside it (including terminal → any, active → draft, and blocked → achieved without passing through active).

Outputs

1. Goal file: lifecycle.status, lifecycle.last_evaluation, optional current_phase / current_activity, turns_evaluated incremented when leaving active for a non-terminal state.
2. Journal artifact: goal-created for draft → active, goal-evaluation for every other transition.
3. One lifecycle_transition event in .flow/runs/<run-id>/events.jsonl when run_id is set.

Workflow

1. Validate — read the goal. If its status differs from the caller's from-state, another process transitioned it: stop and raise the six-field escalation (references/escalation-format.md). Reject a transition outside the table with a stderr explanation and exit 1.
2. Compose the lifecycle fragment:

   lifecycle:
     status: <to>
     current_phase: <preserved or caller-updated>
     current_activity: <preserved or caller-updated>
     turns_evaluated: <incremented when from=active and to is non-terminal>
     last_evaluation:
       result: <pass | incomplete | fail | needs_human_review | blocked>
       reason: <caller-provided; under 200 chars; comma-safe>
       at: <ISO-8601 UTC now>
   

3. Write — bin/flow-goal-record.sh --update-lifecycle --goal-id <id> --lifecycle-file <fragment> --from-status <from>. The helper takes an O_NOFOLLOW lock, replaces only the lifecycle block, validates against schemas/v1/goal.schema.json when jsonschema is installed, and writes tempfile + rename + fsync. Surface any non-zero exit with its stderr; do not retry blindly — a race means re-reading the state.
4. Journal — draft → active: bin/journal-record.sh --issue {N} --type goal-created --metadata goal_id=<id> --metadata source=<src>. Otherwise: bin/journal-record.sh --issue {N} --type goal-evaluation --metadata goal_id=<id> --metadata result=<to> --metadata reason=<short>. Ad-hoc goals with no issue write to the session journal .decisions/session-{YYYY-MM-DD}.md.
5. Run event — when run_id is set, append {"at","type":"lifecycle_transition","goal_id","from","to"} to .flow/runs/<run-id>/events.jsonl; bin/flow-record-activity.sh appends it as part of the FlowActivity the caller records for the phase boundary.

Rules

• Never edit .flow/goals/<id>.goal.yaml directly; never bypass the from-state check.
• Never resurrect a terminal goal.
• Never skip the journal artifact because "the lifecycle block records it" — the goal file is local state, the journal is the cross-PR audit trail.
• Keep last_evaluation.reason short; the reasoning lives in the journal artifact body.

References

• plugins/flow/references/goal-lifecycle-transitions.md — transition table, disallowed transitions, result mapping.
• plugins/flow/references/decision-journal-schema.md — goal-created and goal-evaluation artifact rows.