What is Intent Engineering?
Intent Engineering is the practice of translating user problems and product goals into structured specifications that both humans and AI agents can act on without ambiguity.
Traditional product workflows rely on tickets, PRDs, and verbal handoffs — formats that require a human to interpret intent from context. AI coding agents lack that context. They need specifications that state exactly what should happen, what success looks like, and where the boundaries are.
Intent Engineering closes this gap. Instead of writing a Jira ticket that says "improve checkout speed," an intent-engineered spec defines the user friction ("users abandon checkout when the form takes over 2 minutes"), the measurable outcome ("reduce form completion to under 45 seconds"), the constraints ("no changes to the payment provider API"), and the verification criteria ("load test confirms p95 under 45s").
Why it matters now
The rise of AI coding agents — Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot — has made the quality of your specification the bottleneck. The agent can write code. It cannot decide what to build or why.
Teams that write precise intent get dramatically better output from AI agents. Teams that prompt with vague descriptions get hallucinated features, wasted tokens, and manual rework.
Intent Engineering treats specification as a first-class engineering discipline, not an administrative chore that happens in a ticket tracker.
How it differs from traditional spec writing
From PRDs: PRDs describe features. Intent specs describe user problems and success criteria. A PRD says "add a dashboard." An intent spec says "users can't find their weekly metrics — surface them in under 2 clicks with <500ms load time."
From user stories: User stories capture what a user wants. Intent specs add why it matters (evidence), what "done" means (outcomes), and what must not break (constraints). The format is designed for machine consumption, not just human narrative.
From prompt engineering: Prompt engineering optimizes a single AI interaction. Intent Engineering structures the entire problem so that any agent — or any engineer — can execute it correctly without follow-up questions.
The five parts
Every intent spec follows a consistent structure: Objective (what and why), User Goal (the job-to-be-done), Outcomes (measurable success criteria), Edge Cases (boundary conditions), and Verification (how to confirm it's done). This structure is the IntentSpec format.