Intent Engineering

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References ​

Last reviewed: 2026-06-15.

Grouped by theme. Each entry includes the publication date, or "(ongoing)" with the last-reviewed date for living sites. Chapter *Sources:* lines cite these works where they support a local claim.

Foundations: engineering practice, decision records, plain-text-as-code ​

  • Andrej Karpathy: "Vibe coding". X (Twitter), Feb 2, 2025. Origin of the term used in this book's subtitle.
  • Simon Willison: "Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding". Mar 19, 2025. Practical counterweight to Karpathy.
  • Ian Sommerville: Software Engineering (10th ed., Pearson, 2015). SDLC definition and phases. Cited in "The Map: Intent Engineering and the SDLC".
  • Dave Farley: Modern Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley, 2021). With Jez Humble: Continuous Delivery (Addison-Wesley, 2010) and continuousdelivery.com (ongoing). Feedback loops, sampling, CI/CD vocabulary.
  • Paul Hammant: trunkbaseddevelopment.com (ongoing) and Trunk-Based Development and Branch by Abstraction (Leanpub, 2020). Canonical TBD reference.
  • Yue Jia and Mark Harman: "An Analysis and Survey of the Development of Mutation Testing". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 37 no. 5, 2011, pp. 649-678. Standard survey of mutation testing. Primary anchor for the technique behind the mutation-kill argument in "Tests as Proof, Not Ritual".
  • ISTQB: "ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) Syllabus v4.0.1". ISTQB primary documentation, 2024, ongoing. Equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis.
  • Michael Nygard: "Documenting Architecture Decisions". Cognitect blog, Nov 15, 2011. Origin of the ADR practice.
  • Oliver Kopp, Anita Armbruster, Olaf Zimmermann: MADR template (ongoing) and "Markdown Architectural Decision Records: Format and Tool Support", CEUR-WS Vol-2072, 2018. Markdown ADR template used in docs/decisions/.
  • Flemming N. Larsen: Plain Text as Code Manifest. GitHub, March 2026, ongoing. Author's foundational statement of the philosophy. The Foundation chapter applies it to Intent Engineering.
  • Docs as Code, Write the Docs guide (ongoing). Plain-text-as-code practice.
  • Mermaid (ongoing). Text-defined diagrams. Includes live editor and diagram catalogue.
  • Simon Brown: C4 model (ongoing). Architecture views.
  • Simon Brown: Structurizr (ongoing). Models-as-code tooling for C4 DSL.
  • Terrastruct: D2 (ongoing). A modern diagram scripting language. Produces richer layouts than Mermaid but as of 2026 is not rendered inline by major Git hosts. Referenced in the Plain-Text-as-Code chapter as context for why Mermaid is the current practical choice.
  • Frederick P. Brooks Jr.: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley, 1975, 20th anniversary ed. 1995). "Plan to Throw One Away" (ch. 11): the first system will be discarded. Plan for it. Agentic regeneration collapses the cost of that discard from months to minutes.
  • Alistair Cockburn: Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2004). Origin of the "walking skeleton" pattern. Etymology for the modern skeleton.md artifact.
  • Apache Maven Project: "Introduction to the Standard Directory Layout". Maven Documentation, last modified Mar 9, 2014. Maven popularized "convention over configuration" in the Java build world starting with Maven 1 (2004). This page is the canonical illustration.
  • David Heinemeier Hansson: "The Rails Doctrine". Ruby on Rails, Jan 19, 2016. Codifies "Convention over Configuration" as one of nine doctrinal pillars (Rails released 2004). The most-cited popular usage of the phrase.

Spec-driven development ​

Agentic engineering & agent instructions ​

Security ​