IntentWeaver: Sustaining Coherence across Evolving Intents in Human-AI Co-Writing

Abstract

Writers hold intents at many levels, from overarching goals to concrete wording, and evolve them by periodically popping back up from the text to higher-level intents. Generative AI co-writing disrupts this practice. Dense drafts capture attention and trap writers in local editing; higher-level intents stall while lower-level ones drift from them unnoticed, a breakdown we term intent incoherence. Our formative study traced this breakdown from attention capture through silent drift to failed reconciliation. We present IntentWeaver, which supports intent evolution while sustaining coherence in human-AI co-writing. It derives an intent hierarchy from the draft and writer interactions, evaluates each intent's fulfillment and cross-level coherence at every change, and propagates consequences across intent levels. In a within-subjects study (N=24) against a baseline, participants using IntentWeaver revisited and evolved higher-level intents more often, with fewer unnoticed deviations, and produced texts better realizing them. We further discuss design implications for emergent intents.