Intent-Driven Engineering: Who’s Building in This Space and Where It Started
Industry Landscape · June 2026
Intent-Driven Engineering: Who’s Building in This Space and Where It Started
The idea that intent should precede implementation is gaining serious traction in 2026. Here’s an honest look at the players, the timelines, and what makes each approach different.
Mark Kendall · Principal Engineer · LearnTeachMaster.org
Something is happening in software engineering right now that doesn’t happen often: multiple practitioners across multiple continents are independently arriving at the same core idea.
The idea is simple. Before you write code — before you prompt an AI, before you open a ticket, before you wire up an agent — you need to define your intent clearly enough that the system can act on it reliably. Not a prompt. Not a spec. Intent.
In 2024, I hit that wall personally. I was deep in the prompt engineering era, tweaking inputs, rewording context, chasing consistent output. It wasn’t working — not at enterprise scale, not across teams, not across delivery cycles. The problem wasn’t the model. The problem was that I had never actually defined what I wanted with enough clarity for any system — human or AI — to execute it reliably.
That realization became what I’ve been building and publishing at LearnTeachMaster.org since 2024: Intent-Driven Engineering.
Now, in mid-2026, the space is filling up. Here’s an honest look at who’s in it, what they’re saying, and how the approaches differ.
The Players
Mark Kendall — LearnTeachMaster.org
Dallas–Fort Worth · Active since 2024 · Free · Open
Started IDE after hitting the limits of prompt engineering in 2024 while delivering enterprise systems at Wipro. The methodology grew out of real production constraints — 13 TM Forum microservices on AWS, hundreds of engineers trained, delivery cycles compressed from 20 weeks to under one week.
Published The Intent-Driven Enterprise (ISBN 978-1-105-40759-8, 301 pages). The framework: Define Intent → Compile Action → Deliver Impact. Core philosophy: control must precede intelligence in agentic systems. Clarity is the bottleneck, not execution capacity.
LearnTeachMaster.org is free and open — no paywall, no consulting package required to access the content.
Angle: Delivery-proven, implementation-first, enterprise-scale.
Richard Stockley — intentdrivendevelopment.org
UK · Active since January 2026 · Free ebook
Fractional IT Architect and Executive Coach, Fellow of the British Computer Society. Published a free ebook, Intent-Driven Development (v0.2, April 13, 2026), compiled from an article series written between January and March 2026.
The IDD framework centers on four capabilities: Specify Intent (six structured elements), Govern Execution (Risk Dials for AI autonomy), Measure Alignment (Intent Fidelity across four dimensions), and Scale via an Intent Hierarchy. Academically structured and governance-focused.
The ebook is free to download at intentdrivendevelopment.org in PDF and EPUB.
Angle: Governance and specification-first, consulting and coaching background.
Squer — squer.io
Austria · Early 2026 · Productized offering
A software consultancy that has productized Intent Engineering as a billable engagement model. They’ve created the Intent Engineer as a formal role — someone who owns the what and why, paired with a Systems Engineer who orchestrates AI agents for the how. Two offerings: DELIVER (they provide the pair) and ENABLE (they help you build internal capability).
They’ve explicitly stated they won’t trademark the term, drawing a parallel to how Spotify didn’t trademark the Squad Model.
Angle: Consulting-first, role-based model, commercially productized.
KodeNerds — kodenerds.com
US · December 2025 · Agency blog
A development agency that published Intent-Driven Development 2026 in December 2025, positioning it as their internal methodology after delivering a HIPAA-compliant healthcare platform with 30% of a traditional team size. Pragmatic and results-focused rather than framework-driven.
Angle: Agency delivery methodology, team efficiency framing.
Capital One / Thoughtworks
Enterprise / Consulting · Specification-Driven Development
Neither claims to have created Intent-Driven Engineering specifically, but both have been pushing Specification-Driven Development — a closely adjacent idea centered on AI-generated systems from structured specs. They stop short of the broader intent-first philosophy.
Angle: Specification layer, enterprise tooling, not a complete IDE framework.
LangChain — Agentic Engineering
San Francisco · Formally introduced April 2026
LangChain formalized Agentic Engineering in April 2026 as a multi-agent coordination model — AI agents as digital team members with defined roles, shared memory, and a unified observability layer. Adjacent to IDE but operating at the orchestration layer rather than the intent definition layer. The two ideas complement each other more than they compete.
Angle: Agent orchestration infrastructure, not intent specification.
What This Convergence Means
When multiple independent practitioners across different continents arrive at the same idea in a short window, it’s usually a signal that the idea is correct — not that any one person owns it.
“The space is getting crowded now. Good. That means the idea was right.”
What differs across all these approaches is the starting point and the proof. Stockley comes from architecture consulting and coaching — his framework is rigorous and well-structured. Squer came at it from a consulting product model. KodeNerds came at it from a delivery crisis on a real project.
My path started with a broken experience — prompt engineering that wasn’t producing consistent outcomes at enterprise scale — and the need to solve it in production, not in a whitepaper. The methodology was forged on real delivery: real APIs, real teams, real compression of timelines.
That’s not a claim of superiority. It’s a difference in origin. And origin shapes what a methodology is actually built for.
Where LearnTeachMaster Fits
LearnTeachMaster.org was built from the start as a free, open practitioner resource. No consulting package required to access the content. No ebook gated behind a form. Just the methodology, the playbooks, and the real implementation guides — available to any engineer who needs them.
The Intent-Driven Enterprise (ISBN 978-1-105-40759-8) is available through Lulu. Everything else is at learnteachmaster.org. Still free. Still open.
The convergence happening in this space is a good thing. The more practitioners publishing real work on intent-first engineering, the faster the industry moves past the prompt engineering era — which was never going to scale.
The bottleneck was always clarity. That much, at least, everyone in this space agrees on.
Mark Kendall · Principal Engineer & Enterprise AI Architect · LearnTeachMaster.org · June 2026
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