The intention was "I want to change this guy's hours from 5 to 8." I don't know what else you might mean by "encode the intention."
Suppose you change foo from 9 to 10. Was that because you now wanted foo to be 10 specifically, or because you wanted to increment foo and it happened to be 9 before so it becomes 10 now?
In isolation, these have the same effect. However, one is absolute and the other is relative, so if two of you happen to make that same change at the same time, your intentions matter very much to how your respective changes should be combined.
For example, if your code knows that both changes were intended to set new absolute values, it can automatically determine that the combined effect should also be 10. Similarly, if your code knows that both changes were intended to increment foo, it can automatically combine those effects to get 11. But if all it knows is that two people changed foo in concurrent updates that now need to be merged, that probably results in a conflict that requires manual resolution by a user.
Right, but the assumption of original state is still invalid. An increment from 9 to 10 might be invalid if, say, the guy has already worked 40 hours and by union contract cannot work any more hours. If it had been corrected to 8 and my intent was either "set to 10" or "increment by one," the values of 9 or 10 are both invalid. So, unless we want to attempt to account for all possible rules (and vastly overspend on the project) the best choice when assumptions are invalidated, regardless of intent, is to surface the conflict.
This is very much just a distributed database where we've chosen availability in the presence of network partitions rather than consistency. The end result is that conflicts will inevitably happen, and aside from a hugely complex set of rules, the cheapest resolution is still human intervention.
Suppose you change foo from 9 to 10. Was that because you now wanted foo to be 10 specifically, or because you wanted to increment foo and it happened to be 9 before so it becomes 10 now?
In isolation, these have the same effect. However, one is absolute and the other is relative, so if two of you happen to make that same change at the same time, your intentions matter very much to how your respective changes should be combined.
For example, if your code knows that both changes were intended to set new absolute values, it can automatically determine that the combined effect should also be 10. Similarly, if your code knows that both changes were intended to increment foo, it can automatically combine those effects to get 11. But if all it knows is that two people changed foo in concurrent updates that now need to be merged, that probably results in a conflict that requires manual resolution by a user.