MCP Dev Summit North America

You give an agent a complex task. It says "Absolutely!" Then it deletes your production database.

As engineers adopt AI agents, a common frustration is emerging: agents confidently make the wrong move. The response has been "skill issue," "write better prompts," "add more context," "make a plan first." But not everyone wants to master prompt engineering or maintain context files just to get an agent to understand them.

The missing layer is Intent. Unlike context, intent is ambiguous, implicit, and dynamic. Users don’t always know what they want upfront, and they change their minds once they see options. Forcing that complexity into a one-way text prompt is brittle by design and leads to "context rot."

This talk introduces intent engineering: designing agent workflows that don’t require perfect prompts or perfect context, but instead discover, confirm, and align user intent over time.

Using goose, Rizel will show how MCP Elicitation, MCP Sampling, and MCP Apps let agents ask what you mean, reason about what you might mean, and show you what they think you mean before acting.

Together, these patterns move us beyond mono-directional prompts and toward genuine collaboration.