intent

An intent is the highest-leverage authoring moment in abcd's workflow. Written in a press-release style (present tense, customer-voice), it commits to the outcome before any technical solution is chosen. Planning (/abcd:intent plan) is the product thinker's sign-off on that outcome, not a freeze of the file, and a planned intent's record still changes: its planning interview may edit any part of it, and the intent sub-verbs write a hold, a target release, dependency edges, the spec link, its kind and its impact judgement into the frontmatter, stamp identities onto its scope conditions and append to its grounds.

When to use

Use "intent" when referring to the human-authored document that precedes implementation. Intent files live under .abcd/development/intents/, carry an itd-N identifier and a slug, and are named itd-N-<slug>.md (e.g., itd-10-purge-uninstall.md).

When NOT to use

Do not call an intent a "ticket", "story", or "requirement" — these terms carry Jira/Scrum connotations that conflict with abcd's press-release framing. Do not use "spec" — a spec is the specced implementation block, not the human-authored intention.

Examples

• "The intent for itd-10 describes removing abcd from a project entirely, from the user's perspective."
• "abcd intent interview itd-10 runs that intent's planning interview before it becomes a spec."

Related terms

• record families — the one page that maps the record families and how they relate
• brief — the project-level root document (intent is feature-level)
• spec — the implementation spec derived from an intent
• oracle — used to review intents at promotion time