Foundations in Intent Engineering

Lessons in this section

1. Agents and Prompts

   What an AI coding agent does with your words: it reads, fills gaps, plans and builds. Learn why every gap in a spec becomes a guess, and write your first three spec lines.

2. Guess Gallery

   Replay six failed agent runs. Sort each one into a context gap, an intent gap or a verification gap, then fix it in the layer where it lives: intent.md, a requirement, an acceptance criterion, a constraint or the repo docs.

3. Problem Statements

   Interview a stakeholder with a 5-question budget, pick the evidence that proves the problem is real, and write your first intent.md: user, problem, evidence, outcome with a number, and owner.

4. Scope and Non-Goals

   The agent lists every decision it would make alone. Close each one the right way: a requirement it must build, a non-goal it must leave alone, or an open question it must ask about. Then name a health metric so the agent does not break something else.

5. EARS Requirements

   Write requirements in EARS, five fixed sentence patterns that an agent and a checker can both read. Cover the edge and error cases, and see why a spec is right for one stakeholder, not for every stakeholder.

6. Acceptance Criteria

   Write acceptance criteria as Given, when, then checks that a runner can execute. Prove they work by catching three planted bugs while the correct build passes. Then download your v1 spec kit: intent.md and spec.md for your tool.