Designing for Intent

Overview

An intent is not a request. It is the desired outcome the person is trying to reach, the constraints they are operating under (including ones they never say out loud — a deadline, an attention budget, a boss looking over their shoulder), and the delegation boundary: the line between what they intend to keep deciding themselves and what they are willing to hand off to a feature, a workflow, or an agent.

A prompt, a click, a form field, a one-line issue title — these are rough externalizations of intent, produced under time pressure with an imperfect vocabulary for what the person actually wants. Treat the literal request as evidence of intent, never as a finished specification of it. The gap between what someone typed and what they meant is exactly the terrain this skill works in.