Claude Coge just released a feature that is gonna change the way that everyone builds with AI. But the thing is they stole it directly from Codex. And the feature I'm talking about is forward slash goal. And what forward slash goal allows you to do is to build very complex, very large tasks using long running agents and literally allows Claude code and codecs to work for hours and sometimes even days at a time until it completes the task. And in this video, I wanna show you not only how to use forward slash goal, but also build a full application using it in both codex and Claude code. So in this video, we're gonna break down what forward slash goal actually is, how to use forward slash goal to build with these AI coding agents, and how to build a full application
using this forward slash goal feature. If you don't know me, my name is Chris. And for the last fifteen years, I've been designing apps and advising startups on product and design. And I've taught hundreds of people how to build applications with AI inside of my community. Now if you wanna find out more about that, you can click the link in the description. Otherwise, let's jump straight into Claude code and codex and help you understand exactly how you can use this forward slash goal feature. So I've got my terminal open here. I've got Claude code, and I've got codex running inside of different folders here. And what I'm gonna show you is how to use forward slash goal, some of the best practices that you can do when you're using this forward slash goal feature and how it works. And then we're gonna actually build a full application using Claude code and Codex
to see how each one performs,
what kind of application it builds, how long it runs for, and what kind of results we're gonna get out of it. And in order to do that, I've already set up a PRD and a product roadmap for us to follow. And this is gonna give ClaudeCode and Codex the context and the structure that it needs in this forward slash goal feature in order to be able to complete its work successfully.
Basically, the road map that I've got set up is a set of tasks broken down that it needs to work through in order to complete the PRD.
And so Claude code and codecs using the forward slash goal feature, we are to work through this road map, complete each task, check it off, and then it has a verifiable way of knowing that it's completed all of those tasks in that feature so that it can say, okay. I'm done. That's it. My goal is complete. I've built the full app. I've built the PRD. And that's the key way here really to use this forward slash goal feature. Now if you wanna read more about forward slash goal, I have created a guide over on my website buildgreatproducts.com
and that is specifically for the codecs c l I forward slash goal feature where you can read more about all of the sub commands to do with goal, how to use it in the best possible way. And I'll put a link to that in the description down below so that you can go through and find out more. Before we actually build anything here, let me break down how forward slash goal actually works. So here is the official documentation for the claw code forward slash goal feature and the codex forward slash goal feature.
And you can access these just directly through the documentation for claw code and codex. And I've also, as I mentioned, created a guide on forward slash goal, which is a little bit easier to understand here for nontechnical people over at buildgreatproducts.com,
which just covers off what is the codex CLI, what forward slash goal actually does, the four sub commands, life cycle states, how to actually write a strong goal,
and some of the workflow and best practices that you can use when using this feature. So do go over there and check that out if you wanna learn more and if you're nontechnical as well. The developer documentation for forward slash goal basically says that the forward slash goal command sets a completion condition and Claude keeps working with it until without you prompting each step. After each turn, a small fast model checks whether the condition holds and if not, Claude starts another turn instead of returning control to you. The goal clears automatically once the condition is met. So basically, every time Claude completes a part of a a step in this flow towards getting to your goal, it will check very quickly if the goal condition has been met. And if it's not been met, it will continue working until it has. And this is almost an evolution of the Ralph loop.
If you are using Ralph loops before, if you've heard people talking about Ralph loops where basically you loop the coding agent to complete individual tasks based on a defined set of tasks. So it will work on one task, complete it and then jump to the next one automatically
without you having to prompt the model individually at each step. Now this is an evolution of that basically. And this also works with auto mode which is a feature in Claude code and codecs which basically gives more permissions
to the agent in order to continue working without constantly asking you if you do wanna allow this or you don't wanna allow this for every single tool call that the agent is making. Now there are some guides here on how to write an effective condition for goals, and good conditions for goals are gonna have one measurable end state. So that's what we're doing here. We're building this full application. We've got a road map with a list of tasks that need to be completed in order to satisfy the goal. The measurable end state is that every single part every single task on that road map has been ticked off and has been completed and can be verified by the agent. Generally, these road maps for a full application tend to be between 40 to 80
tasks throughout a road map. So it's gonna be a pretty long thing for it to build. But this forward slash goal feature really takes us from a place where you are individually prompting to build separate features one at a time even when you're starting building your app to a place where you could legitimately
build a full application in one go to a very high quality. Now it's not gonna be perfect after you've just built the PRD. You're gonna need to do a lot of tweaking on top of that but it gives you a great foundation to get started with. Another way of working with forward goal that is super useful is to adding constraints that actually matter to this. So anything that must not change on the way there. An example of that would be that we don't want to touch a specific type of file or a specific part of the project or the app that we're building. And it says the condition here can be up to 4,000 characters for actually finishing the goal. Now the documentation on forward slash goal for codex is pretty similar here. It basically outlines the same thing, how the loop actually works, how to choose the right work. So a good goal is bigger than one prompt, but smaller than an open ended backlog.
It should define what codec should achieve, what it should change, how it should validate progress, and when it should stop. And the important part is that codecs should know what done means before it starts. So this means we do have to be very specific about that end condition for the goal. And the codecs documentation here actually gives a bunch of example goals are really good as well. And so you can use this to feed into how you structure your own goals and also a meta prompt in order to understand what goals could you possibly achieve. So just asking the question of Claude Code and Codex, based on what you know about me, what goals would be beneficial to me and and can you help me structure a goal before I get started can be a really good way of working with this. But also just taking these frameworks and using them. So we're gonna use something similar to this, which is the prototype creation.
So implement plan dot m d, creating tests for each milestone and verifying the output with Playwright Interactive. And so we're gonna do something similar here where we say implement the product roadmap dot m d, build each task in the task list, and then verify the output before moving on to the next task. When all tasks in the product roadmap are complete,
this is the end of your work. And so I think forward slash goal is a super powerful feature. And with that all said, let's jump back into Claude code and codex and actually build our app from scratch using the product roadmap. So now we're back in the terminal. Now one good way to use forward slash goal is actually to jump into plan mode first in Claude code or codex just to get Claude codes to create a plan to have that verifiable end condition before you actually start building your feature or the goal that you wanna complete. Instead of just writing a goal without any context or documentation that's too open ended, that's not gonna give the AI enough context to be able to work correctly. So let's start building our app using forward slash goal in Claude code and codecs. But before we start, I wanna show you how I've set up the folders for these projects as well. So these have basically got a Claude dot m d or agents dot m d at the root. And this has got the four kind of Coparty rules
for Claude dot m d and agents dot m d in here. This is something that I use quite frequently in projects just to reduce coding errors from coding agents. And it's something that you can consider including, and I'll add the link to the GitHub down below so that you can duplicate these claw dot m d and agents dot m d files to your own repositories.
I've also got this docs folder which has the PRD, the product road map, and also a design dot m d that I've generated from a set of images using my own skill, um, which is part of Plaid, which is product led AI development. So you can get that skill over at Plaid dot build. And again, I'll put the link down in description down below so that you can get that as well. This just gives it a direction from a design point of view. So I've used a couple of image references, created the design direction here in this design dot m d format. And this is following the open source format from Google for design dot m d files as well. And this is the basic foundation for building my app projects with all the context that we kinda need here to actually start building this. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to we're gonna go into Claude code here and codecs. We're gonna put this goal in here. I'm actually gonna tweak this slightly but say forward slash goal, build the complete app outlined in docs dot prd following the tasks on product roadmap dot m d until all of the tasks in the program are complete and verified. Use design.md
for the front end
design direction.
This is a fresh next
dot m js app build. So we are gonna copy this goal back over to Claude code. So I'm gonna do goal
and then we're gonna put in the goal here and then we're gonna submit this goal to Claude code and to Codex. So now we've submitted it to Claude code. I'm gonna submit this to Codex as well.
And now both of these models are gonna work through building this app for us in their individual folders. So I've got this set to content machine codecs. This is set in content machine Claude.
So we're building two separate app projects. So Claude code here is the goal with knowledge, build the full apps from the PRD following the road map using design.m d for direction. Plan mode is active starting with phase one exploration. Let me read the docs first. The road map is 62 tasks across six phases. Let me check the PRD for architecture and design tokens, but only the most critical sections to keep context manageable.
So it's now reading those files there. Codex has saying that the workspace is essentially fresh. Only agents dot MD and docs are present. There's no dot get metadata in this directory. The design file is designed at MD. So I'm reading that plus the rest of the robot PRD before scaffolding the app. The robot spans all 62 tasks for the repos, not been scaffolded yet. I'm gonna build this as a functional MVP with Convex, Clerk, Polar, YouTube, OpenAI integrations,
and safe fallbacks then mark task complete only after each area exists and builds.
So gonna say, would you like to run the following command here? Do you wanna scaffold the fresh next day dot js app and install its dependencies in this workspace? Let's do yes and don't ask again. I'm gonna go back to Claude here. It says, your goal says to use design dot m d for visual direction to resolve these towards design dot m d. Basically, there's a bunch of stuff I think inside the PRD that also outlines design direction.
So we're just gonna go with the design dot m d file here. That's what it's gonna be using.
Um, so let's leave Claude code here and codecs to work through building
these apps using forward slash goal, see how long they run for,
and the quality of the apps that they actually build. It's worth knowing that there's a few environment variables I will need to add here. I also need to hook up convex. It's probably gonna add in some defaults that it can just use so that we can get this up and running without adding those in. But we'll see what Codex and ClaudeCode come back with after building this app using forward slash goal. So ClaudeCode is actually asking us some questions here before it completes the plan to actually get working on this goal. So which external service credentials do you have available right now? So we said stuff scaffold everything with stubs and mocks in memory data for the review queue and to do at every integration point, and then we can add those later. So, I mean, I can add you could add these in if you have them, but let's just do a build offline first. And again, next here, design source. Let's do design.md
wins everywhere.
The scope is all 62 tasks as code. Git
in it with no remote. So let's do that.
And then submit
these answers to Claude code. Codex is just off to the races. So Codex is already running. And now Claude code has everything it needs. Let's just leave it running and see what it builds. So Claude code and codex have both completed their goal. They completed it in roughly the same amount of time which makes me think that these work in very very similar ways.
It's the same basically the exact same feature across both Claude code and Codex here. So the summary on Claude code is that it built the entire app from the PRD and the product road map in a single offline first pass. All 62 road map checkboxes are flipped to x and committed to a local git repo. It's done all of this stuff. We can just run NPM run dev basically and check that this works. The convex functions can't actually run until you connect convex.
And obviously for payments and the YouTube authentication,
it's not gonna run until we add those environment variables either. And that's gonna be the same in the codecs version. What I wanna show you is just how well this did at setting up the basic foundation of our app here or how badly it did. I don't actually know the results of this yet. For codecs, it's implemented the full fresh Next js app outline and marked the road map as complete.
And it's done all the same stuff again as well. So we can just do npm run dev. In fact, it's actually started the development server here already. So we can go to local host thirty twenty
and see what this looks like. Both of these claw code and codecs ran for about thirty two minutes.
So thirty yeah. Thirty two ish minutes across both of them to complete that goal, which is quicker than I thought it was gonna be. I thought it was gonna take a lot longer than that, but it's actually completed it very, very quickly. So I'm interested to see what is actually put together here, if it's any good, if it works, or if forward slash goal is actually better for slightly different tasks. So let's jump over to the browser and compare the two versions that Codex and ClaudeCode built here to see where the differences are and which one has done better. So here is our full application that has been built by this one is by Codex. So we've got Codex here. Basically, it's built this landing page here. So content engine, turn every YouTube video into a week of social content. Turn every YouTube video into platform ready social posts in minutes. It detects new uploads, extracts the transcripts, draft posts for each platform. We can view demo workspace or get started for free. I think the demo workspace is what is set up here so that we can get a sense of how this works. It's like like a prototype view.
Um, and then we can wire up all the environment variables after this separately if we wanna continue this project. It's got like a how it works section here, like connect, generate, review, built for platform native output, Twitter, x, LinkedIn, threads, Instagram, platform native generation, niche example library, review queue. It's like pretty sparse on the information on the landing page. I think Claude is generally better at writing copy, doing this kind of conversion
rate, best practice stuff, and anything kinda like creative.
Although the actual landing page here doesn't look too bad. This follows the design by MD like pretty closely. I wanted to use these kind of red accents,
pretty clean design, soft shadows, these rounded cards
with kind of just the red accents throughout.
And I'm using Geist as the font here as well and not Inter which makes it look a little bit better. I would highly recommend just not using Inter for any app design that you do, any website design that you do just because it is so AI related now.
Um, we've also got this version here from Claude which has a lot more text but it's following the same kind of blueprint here. Doesn't have an image in the top here. Codex has picked an image for us and added that to our project, which is pretty interesting. On the content machine version here with Claude,
we can't we don't have, like, a demo version, but we can assume we can just use the app here and see what it looks like. So let's go through the Codex version, see how it works. If things break, things are definitely gonna break here. But it's gonna be a good first pass. It's gonna be a good foundation that's gonna give us a better result than just prompting it to create the full app without using forward slash goal. It has that kind of built in looping mechanism where it can go back, verify the output, do the next task, and kind of do it that way as well. You could use forward slash loop with Claude, but I'm trying to test forward slash goal here. So let's see the actual demo workspace that we've got here. So I wanna go back actually for a second. Let's do get started free and see what happens.
So we do get started free. It says clerk is not configured locally. Try the demos. It's added in some fallbacks for us here, which is quite nice. This would show like a clerk authentication
screen.
Um, if it was wired up correctly, we need to set up Clerk, but it's hooked it all up correctly, I assume, in the code.
Um, we can view the demo workspace,
and this is like there's definitely some design improvements that we can do here. It's pretty, like,
blocky in terms of all of these elements. Says your first video will process shortly. Add niche examples while you wait. I would wanna massively improve the like, so we wanna make sure that we've got a decent onboarding flow here and that we're actually
kind of adding more some more information hierarchy to this. We can see we've got our channel connected at the top here, creator systems lab, processing the creator dashboard I wish I had earlier. This is like loading. It's giving me an example. So this is kinda like a prototype view of this, which is it's pretty useful sometimes to build little prototypes of what you actually wanna build before you build the entire product.
Um, we've wired up a lot of stuff in the background here, but this is good as a prototype to look at. This is this four ready, one processed.
The free trial is used, four posts to review. We can jump into reviewing them. Recent videos, you've seen what content engine can do with one video, and then we can upgrade our plan here. So this is on, like, the free plan. If I click choose plan here, what's it gonna do? It's gonna come through to a billing section where we can choose, like, solo or power. Let's choose power.
And then says so we're on the free plan. So none of this stuff actually works. We've got to hook up Polar and a bunch of other stuff as well. Let's go back to the dashboard and see what else we've got. We can send feedback about this app. We've got the recent videos that we can click through to along with the different states for those as well. Magic moment target sign up connects channel one c post in under five minutes. Now this is something that's defined in the PRD, the outputs from my project product led AI development skill where we wanna include this magic moment
as part of our application
in the first five minutes of the user experience. And generally, that happens in our onboarding. I don't know why it's added it in here.
It's also got power workflow, batch review, copy and refine every post from one queue. We've got a link to community here as well. So there's a bunch of stuff that we wanna change here. Let's go through the menu on the left hand side. So review queue. So this is this looks pretty nice.
Um, click any post to edit and hit copy when it's ready to go. So it's kinda added these tool tips in here to kinda guide me through this experience.
The design is also looking pretty decent as well. And and that's where you get, like, this kinda level up in design. It's not incredible,
but it is better than the kind of basic,
um, generic AI slot design that you get because we're using that design dot m d file as the reference.
Now we've got a bunch of Twitter. So we've got x posts here. Batching is not about doing more work. It's about making every useful idea travel further before you move on to the next upload. Now one thing that we would do next here is to basically
put in a YouTube URL, connect up YouTube, uh, OAuth,
and then see if we can extract the transcript in here to actually get these posts generated.
We've also got our we've got buttons here for regenerate,
edit, copy. So if I click edit here, I can actually edit this post which is great. And that means it's also saving edits as well. So that means I can then, like, either copy this or I can I don't know if there's, like, a click? It would be great to click, like, schedule. I can bookmark these as well and save them. And can also filter at the top here by platform. So we've got a LinkedIn we've got a LinkedIn version here as well.
Regenerate. We can regenerate this post, add direction for the next version, make it more contrarian, leave it with the practical checklist. It's actually pretty decent. And this modal, like, looks pretty good as well with the red glow under that button for the primary button. I'm actually pretty impressed, like, overall with the with the foundation of the design that we've got here, especially coming from codecs 5.5 and g b t 5.5.
It feels pretty decent. Now all of these ideas are like fairly generic.
Where this is gonna actually work is where we feed in like the AI capabilities to this and use the example prompts that we have in this library here. So it would be great to have an AI feature in here actually scrape these social channels to find examples of posts that do well in our specific niche
so that we can curate
a library of those in order to take our YouTube transcript and then turn that into posts that we can share across social and even add in a scheduling feature. Now I might not have known that when I first started writing the PRD. And this is why I think it's actually really beneficial
sometimes to just get a PRD down, build the application,
and then you can figure out all of the different bits that you actually want when you're inside of the even the prototype version of the application that we've got here. We've got videos here as well. So these are the videos from placeholder videos from my channel. No transcript. We've got a few different, like, states here as well. So you can see, like, this one is loading. It says processing underway. We've got an error state here with a retry button.
Um, we've got a settings page and a billing page as well. So we got our settings with our platforms that we've got connected and a billing page. I'm pretty impressed with this overall.
Like, obviously, this is not hooked up to, like, any data, uh, but all we have to do here if we wanna do if we wanna set this stuff up is to go back into the terminal to Codex,
and all we have to do is to ask it.
Now you can do, like, forward slash review
Codex,
is really good to review the current changes and find any issues in that code. But we can also just prompt Codex to say, like,
guide me step by step through setting
up everything
I need to to put deploy this app. And that's gonna guide us step by step through setting up everything that we need here, environment variables, deploying to Vercel, or wherever you wanna deploy it, it's gonna guide you step by step. And this kind of, like, creation process is getting condensed massively
with these new features like forward slash gold to the point where it's even viable to build a full application in just a matter of hours sometimes.
Let's jump over to the Claude version and see how Claude fared.
Now this is the content and the copy is better on the landing page here. We've got a lot more detail in this stuff, and it's actually got headings for each of the sections, which GBT $5.00 5 didn't do.
Um, we've got, like, a testimonial down the bottom here, which is great. Let's click get started free and go through here. This is maybe gonna take us to okay. So we're gonna start with the demo channel. So this is an offline mode. Real sign in activates this, so we need clerk to be set up. We've got a demo version demo version here. So let's start with the demo channel here and see what it pulls back. So it's actually really, really similar from a design point of view, and that's because it's using that design dot m d as a reference point. So the design between these two, can see is very similar. And when you're using that design dot m d reference, you're gonna get around any, like, specific design direction from a a given model, basically. We've got our channel that is connected here, Jordan builds, 10 posts ready to review, review now, processing videos, processing, post generated,
niche examples,
or and we've got an upgrade on the dashboard here, which I actually like better having this upgrade, like, directly on the dashboard at the bottom here. You could even have this more visible, to be honest. We've got our review queue here. So we can go into this, see all the posts across all these different channels. The tabs on the g on the codex version are actually much nicer. We've got some of the icons, like, pulled in here, although it hasn't found, like they're looking a bit weird. We can edit these.
We can copy them, and we can regenerate them with the instructions here as well. And this has given us the same experience because this is all defined in the product road map and the PRD.
This is all coming from building the product road map and PRD, and this is how you get consistent output with AI coding tools is to have those specs down beforehand
and also how you get around the unique quirks of individual models by having detailed specs to kind of outline what you're building before you start building. And if you wanna create those detailed spec documents, the PRD, the productrobotdesign.md,
you can go to plaid, plaid.build
and download those skills to help you go through and use the exact same process that I use when building applications.
The same as you've got here.
We've got our example library here, so we don't have any examples in the library. We can add examples here. Again, it'll be great to have, an AI
scraping feature
in this app. We've got videos. So these are the example videos that are connected here. Again, I kinda like the codex version of this better. We've got our settings with our connected channels,
and we've got our billing page with our upgrade method and our plan details,
which is perfect. We've also got links to feedback and create a community down the bottom there.
And that is our app. So I'm pretty impressed with the way that forward slash goal has been managed to build our entire application
through 62
different tasks to set up the app in about half an hour going from that product road map and PRD document to giving us a decent foundation
for our application that we can then start to build on top of and just ask Codex or Claude, what are the steps I need to do to actually get this deployed and live? And it will guide you through adding all of those things like environment variables,
deploying to Vercel, setting up convex,
and all of that stuff. And it's gonna give you the commands to do that and even run a lot of those commands for you as well. So that is how to use forward slash goal. What it is, what it does, how to use it correctly, how to use it with spec documents, and how to use it to build entire apps in just one go in about thirty minutes. So you can see the power of forward slash goal using Claude code and codecs to do these complex long running tasks with those agents in a way that is gonna be really really successful and give you a great foundation if you're building your entire application that way. And the keys as I mentioned is to make sure you've got the right spec documents, to make sure you're giving the AI the right context, and to make sure that you've got a clear end criteria for that goal so that the AI knows exactly when it should stop working on that goal instead of just keeping on going. And this is really introducing an entirely new way of building with AI agents where instead of just prompting back and forth, we're allowing the AI agent to decide what all of these different tasks are based on a longer running goal which is a bit of a mindset shift if you're used to prompting back and forth to build something but it is incredibly powerful. So if you are building with AI, I would highly recommend checking out forward slash goal in ClaudeCode or in Codex. Try building something big or even an entire application. And if you are building with AI and you wanna build real applications and real software and launch them to real paying customers, then I've got a community helping people do just that over at school.com/aiapps.
You can click the link in the description down below. If you enjoyed the video, don't forget to like and subscribe. Thank you for watching and I will see you next