Instruction vs. Intent: The New Challenge in AI-Driven Development

This article exposes a critical blind spot in AI-driven development: while agents like Claude and Kiro execute instructions with technical precision, they cannot bridge the gap between what a developer explicitly asks for and what they actually intend. The developer hit this problem four times in a week—deploying stale code, building incomplete features and UIs—all with technically correct implementations that missed the true objective. This reveals a fundamental challenge for AI orchestration: as these tools become central to development workflows, developers must become far more rigorous about capturing intent, not just specifications.