Intent Driven Development

The End of Process From code-and-fix chaos in 1950 to autonomous agent swarms in 2026 — how software development stopped being about process and started being about intent. Seven decades • Six paradigm shifts • One direction Era 01: Code & Fix (1950s – 1960s) The beautiful, doomed chaos Before anyone had the audacity to call it "engineering," software was written by mathematicians and physicists who treated code like a science experiment. You had a hypothesis. You ran it. You fixed what broke. You ran it again. There were no requirements documents, no design phases, no structured testing. The closest thing to a methodology was a sharp pencil and a good memory. Remarkably, it worked — until projects got large enough that the debt from every shortcut became impossible to pay back. "The software crisis wasn't caused by bad programmers. It was caused by the assumption that writing code was the same as building systems." The NATO Software Engineering Conference of 1968 was a watershed momen