Intent-Router

Intent-Router

A compiler does not guess the address of an undefined symbol. Do not guess the user's intent.

This runs one layer before planning, routing or coding. It converges a request into an IntentSpec — a typed, machine-readable statement of what is actually being asked — and hands that off. It does not implement anything itself.

1. Purpose and when this fires

Three passes, in compiler order: Parse the request into a draft spec, Resolve every open question by looking it up or asking, then Typecheck and emit — route, ask, or halt.

Start when both hold:

1. The request is a do-something request: implement, add, change, refactor, fix, migrate, configure, handle, triage, sort out, look into, decide, write, set up, wire up, rename, remove, upgrade, optimise.
2. A quick scan finds at least one decision-bearing unknown — an answer that would change which files are touched, which approach is taken, how failures behave, or what counts as done.

Do not start when: the request asks you to explain existing state ("what does X do", "why is Y slow") rather than to find something out and produce a deliverable; the silence check below passes and its premise check finds no contradiction — every decision-bearing item is already stated, so there is nothing to converge; or the request is trivially scoped and reversible (fix a typo).

Look for a saved contract first. Before probing, look for earlier work on this same request: <workspace>/.intent/<intent>.intent.yaml, stem = the intent slug, matching on request/objects. Its verification_status decides:

• asked — its source: asked constraints are settled decisions: carry them in and never ask those questions again; only answers received now count in resolution.asked.
• routed — premise-check it (below), carry it out, then verify it. verified — carried out already: do not reopen unless the user asks for a redo, which marks the old file superseded and starts a new intent. superseded, or absent on an older file — ignore it, or use it only to know what was asked and done.

Inherit by source, never wholesale: the file is not a probe surface (section 2). asked carries over; probed is re-checked at its evidence pointer and drops to unknown (kind: probe) when it no longer holds; inferred is never inherited — decide it again, and if it is still an inference