Everything so far this month is the builder’s side of intent. There’s a user’s side too, and it explains most of the skepticism about agents acting on our behalf.
Look at the reaction to agentic commerce. Hand your credit card to an agent to book a flight? Is that agent going to stay on hold for an hour fixing the refund after it books three layovers with no checked baggage? Who’s accountable when it makes a recklessly stupid decision in your name?
Legitimate questions, wrong conclusion. The point of agent UX was never that the agent does everything for you. It’s the opposite: the agent does the research, the curation, the processing, and then facilitates a decision gate where nothing happens until you explicitly choose. Delegation without decision gates isn’t a product. It’s a liability with a chat interface.
The costs people worry about will take care of themselves. Tokens spent facilitating a good decision are a measure of experience quality, the way milliseconds were for search results. People pay when the problem got solved in less time and with less effort, because for them it was genuinely delegated. The waiting, the multiple rounds to get something right: that friction gets engineered away as models and integrations improve. A matter of when, not if.
What doesn’t take care of itself is the new problem users never had before: deciding how much of their intent to hand over, and trusting the gate to hold. That’s a design problem, and it’s ours. The decision gate is where the user’s intent enters the loop. Remove it, and the agent is executing intent nobody gave it. The same shallow-intent failure from earlier, now with someone’s credit card. Whoever holds the intent holds the accountability, and no product should quietly transfer that without the user noticing.
The practical upshot
Three things I do before any significant AI-assisted work:
Write a context file before the first prompt. Who this is for, what matters to them, what the domain terms mean, what success looks like. This document is the highest-leverage thing I produce in any project.
Have the conversation before opening plan mode. What problem, what success, what constraints, what assumptions. This isn’t planning. It’s clarification.
Trust the AI on how. Verify on what and why. An AI agent is excellent at figuring out how to accomplish a goal. It’s not equipped to verify whether the goal is right. That’s your job, and it happens before the first token.
Intent engineering is what makes AI amplification work. Without it, you’re not amplifying judgment. You’re amplifying speed in whatever direction you were already pointed.
Also in June: Intent Engineering for AI Agents · Shallow Intent Ships Confident Failures · Fifteen Minutes Before Plan Mode
Continues in July with How I Built NIS2.chat and NIS2INTEL.
Daniel Arevalo is Product Experience Lead at Omny Security. He builds AI-native tools and writes about design, product leadership, and what it means to direct systems that execute at a speed humans never had before.