Intent Engineering: Software Was Never the Point

For thirty years, durable software was the only path to the outcomes organizations wanted — so we built it, maintained it, migrated it, and kept feeding it. Most enterprises now spend 60–80% of their IT budgets just sustaining systems that already exist, leaving twenty cents on the dollar for anything new. The machine developed an appetite — and a whole services ecosystem to keep it fed.

AI is being sold as a way to build software faster. That’s true, and it’s the least interesting part. The real shift: when AI can assemble software on demand to serve a specific outcome and dissolve it when the moment passes, software stops needing to be durable. It becomes temporal — built for the moment, gone when the moment ends. The question that’s haunted every technology budget for thirty years finally has an answer: it stops when the moment passes.

But temporal software needs a venue — a durable, governed foundation of organizational knowledge, ontology, and intelligent infrastructure that every temporary application inherits. Most organizations are deploying AI without one. They’re booking events without a venue. The engineers who matter most in this model aren’t building applications — they’re building the venue. We call them intent engineers.