intent-driven-development

A method for turning a vague or high-impact coding request into numbered, observable acceptance criteria. It also records what is in scope, out of scope and how each result will be checked.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before changes involving authentication, security, stored data, migrations, external services or compliance, and when preparing work for another developer.
Why use it?
It makes completion clear and prevents requirements from being quietly forgotten during implementation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement/intent-driven-development
Any agent
npx skills add naimkatiman/continuous-improvement --skill intent-driven-development
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 139 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,581 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00139 $0.02581
Opus 5 $0.00069 $0.01290
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00516
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00258

Measured 2d ago against content hash cf5d9ccf28b6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

intent-driven-development scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/continuous-improvement/skills/intent-driven-development/SKILL.md · 162 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 162 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/intent-driven-development: scope the change before you build it

Law 2 says the plan is sacred: once a goal and its acceptance conditions are agreed, you do not silently drift from them. The cheapest way to honor that is to make the plan verifiable in the first place. A goal phrased as "make export work" cannot be held sacred because nobody can tell when it is met. This skill converts an ambiguous or high-impact request into observable acceptance criteria (AC-001, AC-002, ...) with named verification methods, so "done" is a fact two people would agree on, and a criterion can never be quietly dropped mid-build.

It produces useful criteria without turning specification into ceremony: inspect available context first, expose only genuine ambiguity, and choose verification that fits the work and its risk.

When to activate

  • The user asks to clarify a feature, define acceptance criteria, or de-risk a change before implementation.
  • The request touches security, authentication, persistent data, migrations, external APIs, or compliance.
  • The user wants a handoff artifact another agent or team can implement without inventing requirements.
  • The request is ambiguous enough that the expected outcome is not yet observable or testable.
  • The user types /intent-driven-development, "define acceptance criteria", "scope this change", or "make this testable".

Do not activate for trivial edits, one-line fixes, active debugging, code review, or implementation requests whose acceptance conditions are already clear.

How it works

  1. Inspect context first. Read the repository, docs, schemas, and test infrastructure for technical facts before asking any question. Treat product and business constraints as something only the user or a product artifact can supply.
  2. Choose depth. Quick Capture (3-7 criteria, low or moderate risk) or Full Acceptance Brief (security, data, migration, cross-system, or handoff).
  3. Ask minimally. Only ask questions whose answers cannot be inferred and that materially change scope or behavior. Group related questions into one batch.
  4. Write observable criteria. Each AC-NNN names a scenario, a trigger, an expected observable result, a prohibited side effect when meaningful, a verification method, and a priority. Do not use "correctly" or "securely" without defined evidence.
  5. Proceed or hand off. For a clear request with no blocking risk, record the criteria and continue. For a risky change, present the blockers and wait for confirmation.
  6. Hold the plan sacred. If a criterion cannot be met due to a constraint found mid-build, do not silently drop or work around it. Mark it [revised], state the constraint, adjust scope or verification, increment the revision number, and re-present only the changed criteria before continuing.

Read the full file on GitHub · 162 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 162 lines · 139 tokens per session scan A cf5d9ccf28b6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

intent-driven-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository naimkatiman/continuous-improvement (7 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 139 tokens to every session and 2,581 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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