Part 2 of 3 — Engineering Intent Series - Engineering Intent: The Anatomy of ISL

In the first part of this series, we identified the "Ambiguity Tax" — the inherent cost of inconsistent code produced by treating LLMs as creative assistants rather than deterministic engines. Today, we dive into the anatomy of the solution: ISL (Intent Specification Language). Beyond Prompting: The Contract Layer Standard prompt engineering relies on "hope." You hope the model interprets your bullet points correctly. ISL shifts this paradigm by introducing a formal contract layer. It's less like talking to a developer and more like writing an IKEA manual for software. An IKEA manual doesn't describe the molecular structure of the wood. It tells you: What parts you must have (Domain) What actions to perform in which order (Capabilities & Flows) How to verify the result (Acceptance Criteria) Regardless of who reads the manual, the finished table looks exactly the same. The goal isn't byte-for-byte identical code — LLMs are still probabilistic — but reliable semantic consistency. Sam