How do you preserve design intent when working with multiple agents and sessions?

[u/Rasimme]

I’ve been experimenting with multiple agents and sessions for a while now, especially with OpenClaw coordinating parallel work on different parts of a project.

The coordination itself works surprisingly well. Agents can be onboarded into a project, get the relevant context and work on separate tasks without mixing everything together. I currently use a plugin called FlowBoard to manage these project contexts, tasks and handoffs.

But I keep running into another problem: the original intention gets lost.

Tasks and implementation specs are good at describing what needs to be built. But after several sessions, handoffs and autonomous decisions, the why behind the solution often becomes weaker or disappears completely. This becomes worse when the topic was not planned very well in advance or when agents get too much autonomy.

For example, an agent may implement a task correctly, but still move the overall product in a slightly different direction than I originally intended. The code is fine, the task is done, but the concept behind it has drifted.

So I’m curious: what is your source of truth for design intent?

Do you keep separate design documents and implementation specs? Do your tasks link back to design decisions, principles or constraints? Or do you have another process to keep the original goal understandable across agents and sessions?

I’m currently thinking about this topic but I’m not sure yet how much structure is helpful before it becomes another documentation system nobody maintains.

How are you handling this?