Concept note · the lab vocabulary
Intent locking
Fixing what a request means before anything is built, so nothing downstream can read it another way.
What it is
Turning a request in plain language into a form with one reading, agreed by the person who made it, and freezing that form so every later step is held to it. Ambiguity is not an error in a sentence — "walks the dog more than my husband" is grammatical both ways — so it cannot be caught by checking the work; it has to be removed from the request. Intent locking shows the request back as something that cannot fork, gets a yes, and hashes the result.
In the lab
- The Deterministic Stack →
- The user watches a film of the app — main actions, permutations, edge cases — and agrees; each word and action becomes a signal, each signal a glyph, and the glyphs drawn together are the cartouche that watches the locked bundle.
Our position
Most failures of an AI builder that follows instructions are not failures to follow them. The words allowed what it built. A better model guesses better; it still guesses. Locking the intent moves the guess to the one person who knows the answer, at the one moment it is cheap to ask: before the build.
Honest limitations
Someone has to choose which permutations and edge cases are worth showing, and an unshown case is still open. Agreement is only as good as the attention paid to the film. A locked intent is right for the moment it was agreed; when the person changes their mind, it has to be reopened deliberately, not drifted from.
Related in the vocabulary
- Code provenance →
- Meets it in The Deterministic Stack — whether code is what it claims to be — and proving it with an audit trail.
- Instrumentation →
- Meets it in The Deterministic Stack — building the instrument that makes a hidden state legible.
- Counterfeit code →
- Meets it in The Deterministic Stack — code that is not what it claims to be — it runs, reads clean, and does no real work.
The experiments are the proof
Every claim in this note is made concrete somewhere in the lab — the idea exists because the machines needed it.
The map of the lab →