A single ISA artifact captures the goal verbatim and encodes it as specific, testable claims — each naming the exact command that would prove it false — so the spec literally is the test suite.
Daniel Miessler has a working system he calls the Ideal State Articulation, or ISA, built around a claim he thinks the industry is about to stumble into:
"I think we will soon figure out that the entire game for AI is articulation of ideal state."
His version of the idea is that instead of writing a spec, then a plan, then a requirements document, then a task list — the usual pile of artifacts a project accumulates — you write one document describing what "done" looks like, and the AI does the rest.
The proposal, in plain terms: describe the world as it should be when the work is finished. Not the steps to get there, not the breakdown of who does what — just the finished state, written precisely enough that progress toward it can be checked automatically. As Miessler puts it:
"I think the way it will be articulated is in the form of a single artifact that captures, enhances, iterates on, climbs toward, builds, and tests the ideal state."
That last word — tests — is what separates this from a vision statement or a wish list. A spec tells an assistant what to build. A plan tells it what order to work in. Neither of them, on its own, tells the assistant how to know it has arrived. An ideal-state document does: it is written so the AI can compare current reality against the described end state and keep iterating until they match. In his framing:
"One artifact that captures the ideal state replaces your specs, plans, and PRDs"
(PRDs — product requirements documents — are the formal descriptions of what a product should do that teams hand to engineers.)
The pitch extends beyond software. Anyone running a project with an AI assistant — a business launch, a renovation, a research effort — faces the same frustration: explaining what you want, re-explaining it when the assistant drifts, and checking its work by hand because nothing written down defines "finished" in a checkable way. A single ideal-state document is meant to absorb all of that. You describe the destination once; the assistant navigates and grades its own progress.
The honest caveat is that the system part of this — the artifact that "builds and tests" itself — is, in its current form, a developer's implementation. Miessler's ISA is a working setup he runs himself ("My current implementation of this is the ideal state articulation (ISA) system"), and it lives in the same ecosystem as the AI coding tools his audience already uses. The underlying discipline — write the end state, not the steps — is usable by anyone in a chat window today, with no tooling at all. But the self-testing loop that makes it more than a good prompt requires an assistant that can actually run checks against the world, and wiring that up is still technical work.
This is not vaporware — Miessler says it is shipping, meaning his implementation exists and runs — but it is also not a product with a download page and a price tag in this telling. He does not publish results comparing it against the spec-and-plan approach, and he does not claim it works outside the kinds of tasks he runs it on. What is genuinely available to a non-technical reader right now is the habit: before asking an assistant to do something substantial, write one page describing exactly what the finished result looks like, in terms concrete enough that a stranger could check whether it has been achieved. Whether that scales into the single artifact Miessler predicts — one document replacing the whole apparatus of project paperwork — is the bet he is making, not a fact he has demonstrated.