Intents

Every loop turn starts with an intent: a first-class object that names the aim, selects and scopes analyzers, and acts as the container for everything upstream of the proposal pool. Intents are the root of the provenance chain — every epic ultimately answers “why does this exist” with an INT-n.

Two archetypes

• Directed — you name the work: “Add CSV export”. Directed intents default to targeted analysis such as feature pre-scoping, which maps what already exists before anything is built. Even hand-initiated features get analysis by default, so commitment always follows evidence.
• North Star-driven — you name only the aim: “Move us toward the constellation”. These fan out a broad analyzer battery and let the evidence decide what gets proposed.

Lifecycle

draft → awaiting approval → approved → analyzing → proposing → concluded

Submitting an intent emits the intent.activate checkpoint — whether a human approves, an agent with authority approves over the CLI, or policy auto-approves is decided by your gate configuration. Once approved, firing the intent fans out its analyzers; when analysis settles, proposal derivation runs; when that completes, a standing intent re-arms and a one-shot intent concludes.

A failed run (every analyzer failed) re-arms the intent with the reason stated plainly — a failed run produced nothing, so the intent stays retryable. From approval onward an intent is permanent, because reports, proposals, and epics point back at it; only drafts can be discarded.

Standing intents

An intent’s triggers are what make the outer loop continuous. An intent with no triggers fires once on approval and concludes; an intent with triggers re-arms after each run:

Triggers arriving while a run is already active coalesce into a single follow-up run rather than queueing in parallel — three merges during one run yield exactly one re-fire, which analyzes the repository’s latest state anyway.

Run history you can trust

Every firing produces an immutable run record: what fired it (the exact trigger provenance — which merge, which score movement, which person), a snapshot of the scope at fire time, per-analyzer outcomes, timings, and cost. History renders from the snapshot, never live scope — renaming an analyzer later cannot falsify what run 3 actually analyzed.

Seeded intents

Finished work seeds the next aim. Review learnings, report findings, and triaged signals all create draft intents carrying seed provenance — “Seeded from EPC-12 review learnings”, “Seeded from SIG-238” — which enter the normal approval gate like any other intent. This is the loop’s closure: the output of one turn becomes the input of the next.

Working with intents

The intent view shows the live analyzer rows for the selected run, the proposals it produced, and the full activity trail.