Layer 01 · Before code
Intent
Agents draft. People approve. Nothing is built from an inferred requirement.
Layer 01 · Intent
What the agents do
- Draft the specification, the acceptance criteria and the constraints from a brief.
- Propose the implementation plan and declare its blast radius before writing a line.
- Restate the spec as machine-readable contracts, so the next layer can check against it.
What the machine refuses
- Any work with no approved specification behind it.
- A plan whose blast radius was not declared.
- A requirement inferred rather than written — an agent asked to guess will invent one.
Where a person signs
Approves the plan
No agent starts without a signature, and the signature goes on the plan, not on the diff. A rejected plan costs minutes; a rejected implementation costs days.
Methods
- Specification drafted from the brief
- Acceptance criteria written first
- Blast radius declared up front
- Human planning approval gate
- Spec restated as machine-readable contracts
The other layers