Mostly software Zola 2026-02-09T00:00:00+00:00 https://jhugman.com/tags/intent-transfer/atom.xml 2026-02-09T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-09T00:00:00+00:00 James Hugman https://jhugman.com/posts/intent-transfer/ <p>My biggest unlock of the last month has been this:</p> <p><a class="external-link" href="https://genekogan.com/works/style-transfer/"><img src="https://jhugman.com/posts/intent-transfer/style-transfer-mona-lisa-x-van-gogh.jpg" alt="Mona Lisa restyled by Picasso, van Gogh, and Monet." /></a></p> <ol> <li>have a productive conversation with Claude about a particular part of your project (an epic, an RFC, a file or whatever)</li> <li>then generalize the intent of that conversation into a slash command.</li> </ol> <p>My current process for <em>that</em> is:</p> <pre data-lang="md" style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#303030;" class="language-md "><code class="language-md" data-lang="md"><span>Look at the context for this session. </span><span> </span><span>Notice where it can be generalized for a given epic. </span><span> </span><span>Write a slash command that takes the epic id as a parameter, and put it in ~/.claude/commands/my/. </span><span style="background-color:#f0523f;color:#ffffff;"> </span><span>Make sure the slash command is context efficient. </span></code></pre> <p>Then optionally ask if there's anything that Claude would improve the command, to make it clearer for future Claude.</p> <p>I'm calling this "intent-transfer", evocative of the term "<a class="external-link" href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07629">style transfer</a>" popular a few years ago, the technology behind any number of Snapgram filters, allowing you to make a Mona Lisa as-if-it-were-painted-by Vincent Van Gogh.</p> <p>I've been using a style transfer with writing styles—e.g. <code>using the George Orwell rules for writing</code>—in my <code>writing-clearly-and-concisely/SKILL.md</code>, but this seemed different enough to coin a new phrase.</p> <p>This came in the same week as StrongDM's (quite frankly) amazing set of posts, one of which was called <a class="external-link" href="https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques/gene-transfusion">Gene Transfusion</a>; this, at its heart, seems to be a transfer of patterns from an existing project into yours.</p>