Intent Integrity
The property that what humans authorized is what actually executes — preserved through every agent transformation, compilation, and deployment. Intent integrity ensures that the gap between "what we meant" and "what the system does" remains zero, even when AI agents perform hundreds of intermediate transformations between human authorization and runtime behavior.
Why It Matters
When humans write code directly, intent and implementation are tightly coupled — the developer sees every line. When AI agents generate, transform, and deploy code autonomously, a dangerous gap opens: the human authorized one thing, but the system executes something subtly different. This drift may not trigger test failures or build errors, yet it violates the original authorization.
In regulated domains like healthcare, finance, and safety-critical systems, this gap isn't just a bug — it's a compliance failure. A measure engine that calculates quality scores differently than what was authorized can cost an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in payment adjustments. Intent integrity makes this drift mechanically detectable rather than hoping humans catch it in review.
How It Works
- Intent Contracts — formal declarations of what a piece of code is authorized to accomplish, expressed in a form that survives compilation and deployment. Not comments that get discarded — structured assertions the runtime can evaluate.
- Continuous verification — after every agent transformation, automated checks confirm the output still satisfies the declared intent. Drift is caught immediately, not days later in production.
- Primum (Do No Harm) — a monitoring layer that watches whether execution still accomplishes what was authorized, alerting when behavior diverges from intent regardless of whether tests pass.
- Traceable authorization chain — every transformation maintains a link back to the human decision that authorized it. Auditors can follow the chain from runtime behavior to original intent.
- Gate-layer detection — the gate layer in Stage-Gate-Loop governance specifically watches for intent drift, catching cases where agents produce technically correct code that violates the spirit of what was requested.