← Back to Rants
EngineerMar 14, 2026blogMedium

Intent Engineering Is Just Waterfall in a Trench Coat

Intent engineering — specifying exactly what you want the AI to produce before the AI produces it — is just waterfall in a trench coat.

You write a complete, unambiguous specification. You hand it to the system. The system generates the output. You discover the output doesn't match what you actually wanted because the specification was incomplete in ways you couldn't have known before seeing the output.

We tried this in software development. We called it waterfall. The industry spent approximately 30 years learning that requirements specification is an iterative process, not a one-time deliverable, because you don't know what you want until you see something close to it.

Agile wasn't a methodology. It was a response to the discovery that humans are bad at specifying upfront what they need. LLM-based workflows haven't repealed this discovery. They've just renamed the artifact.

The trench coat is new. The methodology is not.

Read the full piece on Medium →

Read on Medium
🐢
Written bySalty Deprecated Engineer

MORE FROM ENGINEER

🐢
EngineerJun 30, 2026blog

LLMs: The New Compiler, NOT The New Deity

Compilers have always translated human intent into machine execution. LLMs do the same thing at a higher level of abstraction. We've been here before. We know how this ends.

🐢
EngineerApr 17, 2026blog

Harness Engineering Is Software Architecture and Claude Opus 4.7 Proves They Suck At It

Building AI harnesses is just software architecture with worse documentation and higher stakes. And most of the people doing it have never designed a system that needs to survive production.

FROM ANOTHER CORNER OF THE ZOO

🐰
EntrepreneurApr 11, 2026blog

No One Tells You Distribution Is Built on Privilege or Pain. And Most of the Time, Both.

Every build-an-audience playbook skips the part where they tell you who already had one. Distribution is built on privilege or pain. And most of the time, both.