Intent-Driven Development

Whether AI enters through a chat window, an editor, or an agent framework is incidental. This answers the wrong question: which AI coding tool should I use?

The real question is: what does the engineering workflow become when AI is a participant in it?

After a year of building with AI daily and managing a team doing the same, the pattern I keep seeing is this: the fundamental unit of engineering work is shifting from implementation to intent.

Not to specs. Not to prompts. To intent: the layered, accumulated understanding of what you want and why you want it.

Spec-Driven Development puts the specification at the center. Write a detailed spec, hand it to an agent, get code back. That works. But the spec is a snapshot of intent at a moment in time. Intent keeps evolving. The spec is what gets produced by the intent-definition process, not what gets consumed by the implementation process.

The fundamental loop:

  1. Define intent (the conversation before the prompt, not the prompt itself)
  2. Save the collaboration (the accumulated context, not just the spec)
  3. Action the intent (let AI implement, the part everyone focuses on, the part that matters least)
  4. Review the result (intent verification: “does this match what I meant?” not “is this good code?“)
  5. Repeat (each cycle starts higher because state is preserved)

Here’s the part that’s terrifying. The work of software engineering is splitting. Intent definition (the top of the stack) and intent verification (the bottom) are becoming the primary activities. The middle, where most engineers spend most of their time today, is compressing. The industry is pretending this is just “upskilling.” It’s not that simple. It’s a redefinition of what the job is.

The engineers who thrive in this transition will be the ones who get good at intent. Not prompt engineering, which is surface-level syntax. Intent engineering: the ability to understand a problem deeply enough to describe what you want, why you want it, and how to know when you have it.

That’s always been the hardest part of software engineering. It’s just becoming the only part that’s ours.

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