Intent is the work, not output.
A few words of hope become a mountain of code that cannot be what you meant — because you never said what you meant. The gaps you leave are filled by the machine's defaults, not your intent.
You manage the intent. The machine writes the code.
What everyone knew, and almost no one did.
- Everyone should have written acceptance criteria in Gherkin.
effortnow the cheap part - Everyone should have written the test before the code.
effortnow the cheap part - Everyone should have written an architecture designed, documented, and easy to find.
effortnow the cheap part
Not because they were wrong — because they took effort, and effort was the first thing cut when time ran short. That has inverted. An agent asks the questions until the scenarios hold, writes the tests before the code, and keeps the model and the decisions next to it.
A high-quality codebase is a default you choose — not a budget you fight for.
Standards, not invention.
Gherkin, C4, arc42, ADRs: what is known to work, in words every engineer already knows.
Review the intent, not the diff.
Reading a thousand generated lines is review hell. Review the scenario and the design before a line exists; the tests prove the rest.
Small slices beat big prompts.
The bigger the ask, the more the machine fills with its own defaults. One rule, a few scenarios, one session — and you stay the author.
Guidance isn't enforcement.
An agent follows its instructions most of the time. What has to hold every time is a git hook, a test, a linter — deterministic, whatever the agent made of its prompt.
A contract, not a briefing.
Agents briefing agents pass on misinformation — read their briefings and you find it. Every agent reads the spec and the model first-hand.
You don't need an IDE.
An IDE is a tool for editing text, and you no longer edit text: you decide, you read, you review. What you need is a sandbox for the agent, viewers for the spec and the design, fast tools for skipping through code and changes — and guard rails.
The NoVibe stack →The heavy tools get light.
Ticket trackers were built for writing long tickets; with the intent in the spec, they keep the epics and the priorities, nothing more. Wiki pages give way to a knowledge graph of the domain — coming to NoVibe.
The machine writes the code now. That leaves two ways to work.
Passenger the translator
- prompts, and hopes
- reviews what the machine made
- trapped in review hell
Driver the author
- decides the intent
- reviews the spec and the design
- owns it, from intent to ship