Before I open plan mode in Claude Code, I have a conversation.
Not about the feature. About whether the feature should exist. What problem it actually solves. What success looks like from the user’s perspective in the next sixty seconds. What constraints the codebase imposes. What I’m willing to trade off.
Only once I can answer all of those clearly do I open plan mode.
Most people skip this step. They go straight from “I want to build X” to “plan this for me.” And they get a beautiful, detailed, confident plan for building the wrong thing.
This is the new failure mode. Not bad execution. Confident execution in the wrong direction.
Prompting is tactics. Intent is strategy.
Prompt engineering is how you phrase a request. Intent engineering is what you bring to the conversation before you phrase anything.
Tobi Lütke, Shopify’s CEO, prefers the term context engineering: stating a problem with enough context that it becomes plausibly solvable without additional information. He’s right about the skill. But context without intent is just information. You can hand an agent everything about your product and still get the wrong thing built, because nothing told it what mattered.
When you delegate to a colleague and leave something implicit, they fill the gap with common sense. Agents don’t fill gaps. They exploit them. In my experience, agents rarely fail because they can’t reason. They fail because the objectives, outcomes, and constraints I gave them were underspecified, and they optimized whatever was left.
Each new model generation ships better execution, and the limiting factor stays the same: the quality of intent it receives. Prompt engineering optimizes within that ceiling. Intent engineering raises it.
Also in June: Shallow Intent Ships Confident Failures · Fifteen Minutes Before Plan Mode · Agents Fail Users at the Decision, Not the Execution
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.