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What Goals are

Goals are the durable intent layer in ClawKitchen. If tickets represent concrete work items moving through a workflow, goals represent the larger outcomes that should survive beyond any one ticket.

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Canonical storage root

Goals are stored as markdown files in the OpenClaw global workspace: ~/.openclaw/workspace/notes/goals/ Each goal is a single file: ~/.openclaw/workspace/notes/goals/<id>.md

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Why this matters

This is another strong example of the ClawKitchen model:
  • the UI helps you manage the data
  • the data itself remains in durable, inspectable files
That makes goals easier to review, back up, script against, and understand outside the browser.

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Frontmatter schema

Goals are markdown files with YAML frontmatter: 
---
id: increase-trial-activation
title: Increase trial activation
status: planned # planned|active|done
tags: [growth, onboarding]
teams: [development-team, marketing-team]
updatedAt: 2026-02-17T00:30:00Z
---
The body below the frontmatter is freeform markdown.

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Multi-team association

A goal that spans multiple teams is represented by one canonical goal file. Use teams: [...] to associate it with multiple teams. The UI supports filtering goals by team.

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Good use cases for Goals

Use goals when something is:
  • bigger than one ticket
  • likely to survive several implementation cycles
  • shared across teams
  • important enough to keep visible even when the active ticket list changes

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Safety and guardrails

The Goals API protects the goal storage root, rejects path traversal, and validates goal ids. That keeps the feature grounded in a safe, constrained file model instead of turning it into arbitrary file mutation.