Human Intent
The Argument
When execution stops being the constraint
For most of the last century, organisations were built to answer one question: how do we get work done? Departments, roles, management layers, methodologies, all of it existed because execution was hard, slow, and expensive.
Agentic AI is removing execution as the primary constraint. Not completely, and not perfectly, but enough to matter. And when execution is no longer the bottleneck, the question every organisation faces changes:
Do we actually know what we want?
That is the question the Human Intent series takes on. It began as Intent-Driven Development, a framework for building software in the agentic era. But the principle at its core, govern intent, delegate execution, does not stop at the codebase. Human Intent follows it into the whole organisation: what happens to management, to methodologies, to organisational theory, to the C-suite, and to the very idea of work, when the uniquely human contribution becomes the quality of the intent itself.
Seven articles so far, each dismantling one assumption of the work-centred enterprise. They are best read in order.
01
Human Intent – Organisational Change in the AI Era
The opening argument: why every function, not just engineering, must shift from managing work to governing intent.
02
Human Intent – Agile is Dead, Long Live agile
Capital-A Agile, the methodology and its ceremonies, is dying. Lowercase-a agile, the spirit of iteration and fast feedback, has never been more alive. What survives, what transforms, and why.
03
Human Intent – The End of Taylor’s Century
From Taylor’s scientific management to Kotter’s dual operating system, every major organisational theory has been a variation on optimising human work. Agentic AI ends that century-long frame.
04
Human Intent – Contribution Without Work
The doing of things continues. What is dissolving is work as the organising principle of enterprise life, the unit around which structures, roles, and methodologies were built.
05
Human Intent – Contribution Beyond Work
A deliberately paradoxical title. Why most AI-skills advice misses the deeper shift, and what actually makes humans professionally valuable when execution is delegated.
06
Human Intent – Chief Intent Officer (CIO)
The 1980s Chief Information Officer was the right answer to the 1980s question. Same three letters, new word in the middle: why the existing C-suite cannot quite reach the gap, and what changes when intent moves into the boardroom.
07
Human Intent – The Human Intent Stack
How intent moves from human purpose through strategy and governance to machine execution, and the world-readiness test most organisations are not yet running.
08
For seventy years we spoke the machine’s language. Natural language reversed that, and it is the interface, not the raw capability, that made governing intent possible in the first place.
Companion pieces
Two shorter essays written alongside the series, expanding on its themes.
01
AI feels unprecedented. Organisationally, it is familiar. Twenty years of cloud computing taught us that governance lags technology, and the same pattern is unfolding again, only faster.
02
AI costs are rising even as token prices fall. The real issue is the hidden cost of unclear intent: every vague prompt, retry, and agentic loop turns poor articulation into spend.
Where It Began
Born from Intent-Driven Development
Human Intent extends a principle first worked out in software engineering. Intent-Driven Development is a complete framework for building software with agentic AI: Intent Specifications, Intent Fidelity, Risk Dials, Human Gates, and the Intent Hierarchy. The full methodology and free ebook are available at its home.