Intent Alignment Reviews: Justify Every Line of Code

A program can produce the right answer and still contain work that does not help it reach that answer. Tests pass, the output looks correct, and unnecessary computations survive because they appear harmless. This becomes easier to miss in AI-generated code. A model can produce a plausible implementation in seconds, but plausible code often includes variables, conversions, or branches that the requirement never asked for. An intent alignment review adds one question to the usual correctness check: Does every instruction help achieve or explain the stated goal? This does not require a formal proof or an exhaustive line-by-line exercise. The useful result can be concise. Correctness and intent Correctness asks whether the observable behavior matches the specification. Intent alignment looks for code that contributes neither behavior nor useful clarity. The goal is not to produce the fewest possible lines. A named constant or helper function can be worthwhile even when the program could run without it. The concern is accidental complexity: code that suggests requirements or design decisions that do not actually exist. AI can help by reading the requirement and implementation together. It can confirm the working behavior, identify unnecessary instructions, and explain whether those instructions are harmful or simply unhelpful. A small Fibonacci example Consider this specification: The function should print to stdout the first hundred elements of the Fibonacci sequence. The phrase "first hundred" does not specify whether the sequence begins with 0, 1 or 1, 1 . For this review, we assume the intended convention begins with 0, 1 and prints one value per line. def print_fibonacci_100 (): a , b = 0 , 1 sequence_limit = 100 display_width = len ( str ( sequence_limit )) for index in range ( sequence_limit ): current_value = int ( a ) print ( current_value ) a , b = b , a + b checkpoint = ( index + 1 ) % 10 == 0 final_pair = ( a , b ) print_fibonacci_100 () Review The implementa