The Observation
I didn’t build structured data systems because I predicted WebMCP or the agentic web. I built them because “touch it once, make it findable by any system” is just good practice. “Computers do the mundane, humans critically think” is just a sound division of labor. These are principles, not predictions.
But those principles, arrived at independently, produced exactly the infrastructure the agentic web needs. A straight line runs from a thought card I wrote in August 2025 to a platform that’s accidentally ready for a protocol Google announced six months later.
That’s not luck. That’s what good principles do. They’re robust across futures you didn’t predict.
The Pattern
Predictions are fragile. They’re right or wrong, and the world rarely cooperates with specifics. Principles are antifragile. They produce good outcomes across a range of scenarios because they’re grounded in how things actually work, not how you think they’ll play out.
“Structure your data” works whether the next interface is a browser, an agent, or something nobody’s imagined yet. “Own your stack” works whether the threat is a marketplace, a data intermediary, or an AI platform. “Humans think, machines execute” works whether the machine is a spreadsheet or a large language model.
The companies that survive transitions aren’t the ones that saw them coming. They’re the ones whose principles already fit where things were headed.
Open Questions
- How do you tell the difference between a principle and a preference you’ve elevated to a principle? “Own your stack” feels like a principle, but is it actually just my preference dressed up as wisdom?
- Can you build an organization around principles this way, or does it only work when one person holds the vision? What happens when principles need to transfer across a team that didn’t arrive at them organically?
- Where are my current principles wrong? If good principles carry you into futures you can’t see, bad ones carry you into walls you can’t see either.