intent drift
[ in-TENT drift ]noun
The gap between what you asked for and what the AI reasonably assumed you meant.
Explanation
“Add login” leaves out almost everything, and the AI fills the gap with its own defaults, which are rarely yours. Drift is not the machine being wrong. It is the machine being sensible about something you never said.
Related words
- overfitting to the prompt — Doing exactly what you literally asked for and completely missing the point of it.
- constraint block — The part of your prompt that says what the AI is not allowed to do: which tools, which files, which lines it must not cross.
Prompts that deal with it
- Lock the Stack — Stop it choosing your tools for you
- Plan Before It Types — Read, then suggest, then stop