Goal mode & monitor

Run long Codex goals with a sidecar monitor — curated Sidecar events instead of raw tool spam.

Documents Stack 0.2.0-dev.20260703.2. Release notes: Stack Changelog.

Long Codex runs produce a lot of output. Goal mode pairs your worker with a monitor sidecar: a second Codex thread that watches progress and writes Sidecar events — short headlines and milestones you can skim without reading every tool call.

Start a goal

From the Agent input, describe an objective and send it. Stack runs the worker in goal context and wakes the monitor sidecar on tool/turn events.

Use stack doctor first to confirm Codex and stackd are healthy.

Center pane views

In goal mode, the default center view is Sidecar events — human-facing updates, not the raw worker transcript.

Key	View	What you see
e	Sidecar events (default)	Curated monitor.goal_status rows, steers, errors
t	Sidecar thread	Monitor reasoning — how it decided
a	Agent tape	Full agent.* + monitor.* interleave for debug

The worker tape is thinking traces. The sidecar stream is the higher-level story: what the worker is doing, which milestone landed, what went wrong.

In 0.2.0-dev.20260703.2, goal mode keeps the worker chat and slash commands available while the monitor sidecar is open. Use /monitor chat or /monitor stream to switch sidecar focus without losing the worker input lane. Use /lights on for the thread/gardener/cloud status panel while the goal keeps running.

Headline strip and timeline

The goal shutter shows:

• a headline strip from the latest operator-visible status
• a milestone timeline built from typed monitor.goal_status events

The monitor audits worker done-claims before emitting goal_met. Bogus claims surface as goal_failed or blocked instead of a false green checkmark.

Monitor profiles

On first run, Stack seeds monitor profiles from the install bundle into .stack/monitors/:

Profile	Role
default	Primary monitor actor
progress-narrator	Passive human progress updates on summaries

Useful environment overrides:

export STACK_MONITOR_PROFILE=progress-narrator
export STACK_MONITOR_ENABLED=0              # disable monitor
export STACK_MONITOR_STRICTNESS=passive     # passive | conservative | aggressive

In the TUI, press M to cycle the current thread through off → passive → conservative → aggressive → off.

What the monitor checks

The monitor is event-backed. It watches focus areas such as:

• style and guidance rules (e.g. destructive git patterns, secret paste)
• goal progress and acceptance
• skill use on Synth/Stack work
• tool use and scope control

The sidecar is always a persistent Codex thread — Stack wakes the same thread for event batches and operator sidecar chat. There are no separate monitor worker overrides.

Operator-visible updates (MCP)

The monitor posts updates through the Stack MCP tool stack_monitor_goal_status with fields such as status, headline, note, for_human, and optional metric. Codex agents with Stack MCP registered can emit these during long runs.

Gardener and meta-threads

/gardener opens the gardener in the core panel. The gardener can now use Stack MCP owner-route tools to create durable Stack-visible worker/meta threads and assign a goal:

• stack_worker_thread_create
• stack_meta_thread_create
• stack_meta_thread_update_goal

Those tools return ids when a durable thread or goal binding exists. A gardener should not claim it spawned or assigned a durable thread unless one of those tools returns the new thread_id and meta_thread_id.

Known limitations

Not yet shipped on the public channel:

• multi-goal portfolio view and ETA/progress rate
• bulk archive from the goal shutter
• automatic cross-actor gardener escalation on every risky signal

Use gardener lifecycle controls for archive/revive when you need explicit thread management. Sidecar pause sleeps the monitor until the next wake — it does not archive threads.

Next

• Cockpit controls — full keyboard map
• Stack MCP — stack_monitor_goal_status and live ops tools
• Quickstart — install and first stack demo