About

Structure Intent is an open project to develop structured intent into an engineering discipline: a way of writing down what software is for, what it promises and who decided, so that machines can build from it and check against it.

It is created and maintained by jaynryan.

Origins

• January 2026: the author begins developing the framework independently.
• 7 November 2026: the manifesto (version 0.2) and the code repository are published.

Structured intent builds on the work of many others, credited in full in the manifesto. The most direct antecedents:

• Sean Grove (OpenAI), 2025, argued that specifications are becoming the fundamental unit of programming, and named the valuable artifact “structured intent”.
• Shuvendu Lahiri (Microsoft Research), March 2026, framed intent formalization as the grand challenge for reliable AI-assisted coding.
• Decades of work in requirements engineering, design by contract, formal methods and model-driven engineering.

How to cite

jaynryan. Structure Intent: A Manifesto, version 0.2, 7 November 2026. https://structureintent.com/manifesto/

BibTeX:

@misc{structureintent2026,
  author = {jaynryan},
  title  = {Structure Intent: A Manifesto},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = nov,
  note   = {Version 0.2},
  url    = {https://structureintent.com/manifesto/}
}

License

The text on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may share and adapt it for any purpose, with credit. Code in the repository is MIT licensed.