6 min read · 2026-06-02
Product organizations were built to move artifacts: requirements to specs, specs to designs, designs to tickets. Each handoff was a compression, and each compression lost intent.
AI changes the economics of that chain. Generation is cheap; judgment is not. When a system can produce a hundred plausible directions, the scarce input becomes a precise, shared statement of what we are trying to achieve and what constitutes a good outcome.
That is why I treat intent as infrastructure. Written down, versioned and machine-readable, it becomes something both a team and an agent ecosystem can operate against.
This is an evolving practice, not a settled standard. The point is to make the shift deliberate rather than accidental.