What does Intent contain?

Specs & user stories · Acceptance criteria · Mockups · Decision Directives · OKRs & roadmap · Personas · Product hypotheses.


The fundamental invariant


Humans vs AI Agents

Human

Formulates intent, aligns the team on what is being built, prioritizes, decides trade-offs.

AI Agent

Consumes as direct instruction to generate code, tests, components, migrations. The precision of this register directly determines output quality.

Asymmetry: formulation vs. execution.


Consumption modes

System Prompt

Universal Decision Directives (applicable to all tickets) go in the system prompt.

Context Injection

The current spec, user stories, and task-specific Decision Directives are passed by context injection.


Decision Directive structure

intent/directives/event-driven-indexation.md YAML + Markdown
---
register: intent
level: team
owner: tech-lead
status: active
consumption-mode: system-prompt
last-validated: 2026-06-03
supersedes: null
exception-to: null
---

# Decision Directive — Event-driven indexation

All hotel catalogue updates must transit through a Kafka event
before any write to Elasticsearch. No synchronous catalogue write
to Elasticsearch is allowed in this bounded context.

Acceptance criteria: see Contracts/search-indexation-sla.md
Decision context: Knowledge/decision-contexts/event-driven-indexation.md

Spec structure in Intent

intent/specs/SEARCH-89.md YAML + Markdown
---
register: intent
consumption-mode: context-injection
---

# Spec SEARCH-89

## Objective
Reduce P95 latency of the results page to under 200ms.

## Acceptance criteria
- [ ] P95 measured on the indexation pipeline: ≤ 200ms
- [ ] No synchronous Elasticsearch write (see Decision Directive /directives/event-driven)
- [ ] Load test: 500 req/s for 5 minutes without degradation