Goals & Todos

Long-term goals, per-thread objectives with budgets, and a kanban task board - how OpenHuman stays pointed at what matters.

OpenHuman keeps the agent aligned with what you actually care about through three complementary layers: durable long-term goals, a single thread goal per conversation, and a collaborative task board of todos. Each one is editable by both you and the agent, and all of them survive restarts.

---

Long-term goals

A short, human-readable list of your durable objectives, things like "Ship the desktop app" or "Grow the community to 10k." It lives as a plain Markdown file (MEMORY_GOALS.md) in your workspace, so you can open and edit it directly.

The list is deliberately tiny, capped at roughly 8 items / 500 tokens, so it's cheap for the agent to read on every relevant turn and easy for you to keep honest. Each goal gets a stable short id (g1, g2, …) so it can be edited or deleted without depending on order.

• Goals Panel (Intelligence → Goals) shows the list with add / edit / delete actions.

• Reflect runs a background goals_agent that reviews your goals against recent memory and conversation, then makes minimal, justified changes: adding what you've clearly started pursuing, retiring what you've dropped. On first run it bootstraps an initial set from your context.

• The agent reads and updates the same list mid-conversation via its goals_list / goals_add / edit tools, so your edits and the agent's stay in lock-step.

RPC surface: openhuman.memory_goals_list / _add / _edit / _delete / _reflect.

---

Thread goals

Each conversation can carry one thread goal: a durable "completion contract" the agent works across turns, interrupts, resumes, and budget boundaries. A thread goal has an objective, a status, and an optional token budget so you can cap how much work a thread is allowed to consume.

Status	Meaning
active	The agent may keep working the objective.
paused	Suspended (e.g. you interrupted); reactivates when the thread resumes.
budget_limited	Tokens spent ≥ budget; substantive work halts until you raise it.
complete	Objective satisfied.

The orchestrator sets a goal with goal_set, reads it with goal_get, and finishes it with goal_complete. Updates emit thread/goal/updated events so the UI stays live.

Autonomous idle continuation. If a thread has an active goal and goes idle (no in-flight turn, no activity for a configured interval, e.g. 10 minutes), the heartbeat can inject a single continuation turn that resumes the transcript and keeps working the objective. It's opt-in (heartbeat.goal_continuation_enabled) and guarded by a one-shot suppression flag per idle period, so the agent never self-drives into a loop.

---

Task board (todos)

Every conversation also hosts a kanban-style task board: a list of discrete work cards that you and the agent build together. Unlike a thread goal (one durable objective), the board is a collection of concrete items, each with rich structure:

• Title / description, and a status: todo, in_progress, awaiting_approval, ready, blocked, done, rejected.

• Optional objective and desired outcome.

• An ordered execution plan, acceptance criteria checklist, assigned agent, and an approval mode (required / not required).

• Notes, blocker reason, and evidence / links.

The agent reads the board with todo_list, appends with todo_add, edits with todo_edit, and advances status with todo_update_status. Destructive operations (clear / remove / replace) are disabled by default. You and the agent share the same persistence, so edits stay consistent.

Two reserved boards back special views:

• user-tasks: your personal task list, not attached to any conversation. Create and manage these from the User Task Composer (Intelligence → Tasks). You can optionally attach a task to a conversation and assign it to the orchestrator with approvalMode: not_required, so the background dispatcher auto-picks and runs it.

• task-sources: an inbox for tasks ingested from external sources before they're promoted to an agent workstream.

RPC surface: openhuman.todos_list / _add / _edit / _update_status / _set_session_thread. Responses include a rendered markdown field so the board renders identically in the UI and in agent transcripts.

---

How the three relate

Layer	Scope	Count	Who drives it
Long-term goals	Your whole account	~8 max	You + periodic goals_agent reflect
Thread goal	One conversation	1 per thread	Orchestrator, with optional budget
Task board (todos)	One conversation	Many cards	You + agent, collaboratively

---

See also

• Subconscious Loop: the background loop that powers idle continuation and task evaluation.

• Memory Tree: what goal reflection reads from.

• SuperContext: first-turn grounding that complements goal-driven work.