Intent Prototyping: A Practical Guide To Building With Clarity (Part 2) - Smashing Magazine

"Here is a practical, step-by-step guide to Intent Prototyping - a disciplined method that uses AI to turn your design intent (UI sketches, conceptual models, and user flows) directly into a live prototype, making it your primary canvas for ideation. In Part 1 of this series, we explored the "lopsided horse" problem born from mockup-centric design and demonstrated how the seductive promise of vibe coding often leads to structural flaws."

"The answer is a more disciplined process I call Intent Prototyping (kudos to Marco Kotrotsos, who coined Intent-Oriented Programming). This method embraces the power of AI-assisted coding but rejects ambiguity, putting the designer's explicit intent at the very center of the process. It receives a holistic expression of intent (sketches for screen layouts, conceptual model description, boxes-and-arrows for user flows) and uses it to generate a live, testable prototype."

"This method solves the concerns we've discussed in Part 1 in the best way possible: Unlike static mockups, the prototype is fully interactive and can be easily populated with a large amount of realistic data. This lets us test the system's underlying logic as well as its surface. Unlike a vibe-coded prototype, it is built from a stable, unambiguous specification."

Mockup-centric design produces a "lopsided horse" problem where vibe coding's seductive promise leads to structural flaws and design debt. The gap between design intent and live prototypes creates ambiguity that prevents early iteration on real functionality. Intent Prototyping converts explicit design intent—UI sketches, conceptual models, and user flows—into live, interactive prototypes using AI-assisted code generation while rejecting ambiguity. Prototypes become primary ideation canvases that are testable and populated with realistic data, enabling validation of both surface and underlying system logic. Stable, unambiguous specifications reduce reverse-engineering for engineers and lower conceptual model failures.

Read at Smashing Magazine