Epic Mode: Turning Intent to Code

The gap between intent and implementation

Every engineering team has a moment where a good idea turns into a bad outcome, not because the idea was wrong, but because the intent behind it got lost somewhere between the kickoff conversation and the pull request. An agent doesn't have the years of context a teammate has. It fills gaps with guesses, and guesses drift.

We built Epic Mode to close that gap: a structured way to carry intent — the why, the constraints, the edge cases — all the way from a rough idea to a merged change, without it evaporating in a chat window.

From a single idea to a system of specs

An Epic starts as almost nothing: a sentence, a Slack thread, a hallway conversation. Epic Mode's job is to turn that into a system of small, focused specs — a PRD, a tech plan, a set of edge-case clarifications — instead of one giant document that goes stale the moment reality changes.

Each mini-spec is scoped tightly enough to review in minutes, not hours. When something changes, you update the mini-spec that's actually affected instead of re-reading a wall of text to find what still applies.

Tickets as the unit of execution

Once a spec is solid, Epic Mode helps you break it into tickets directly on the Epic board: small, scoped units of work that map cleanly to files, services, and acceptance criteria. A ticket should be small enough that an agent, or a teammate, can pick it up without guessing what "done" means.

This is the actual mechanism that turns intent into code: not a single giant handoff, but a sequence of well-specified tickets that an agent can execute with confidence, one at a time or in batches.

Execution without losing the thread

Epic Mode is deliberately agnostic about who, or what, implements a ticket. Hand it to Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, or your own custom agent; the ticket carries the context, so the executor doesn't need the whole history of the conversation that produced it.

And because every ticket traces back to its spec, verification has something concrete to check against: not "does this look right," but "does this match what we said we were building."

What's next for Epic Mode

This is an early look at the thinking behind Epic Mode. Over the next few releases we're refining the elicitation flow, tightening the connection between specs and tickets, and building out verification so it runs continuously instead of as a final gut-check. The goal stays the same: keep intent intact from the first idea to the code that ships.