Designing for Invariants

Why this matters: In an era of rapid platform and protocol churn, the smartest move is building systems that survive collapse -- not ones that predict the future.

From where I sit, three shifts seem to be reshaping the web:

  1. Agents increasingly act on our behalf — not replacing humans, but mediating discovery, synthesis, and action.
  2. Identity becomes more programmable — wallets, attestations, passkeys, signed statements.
  3. Click-based traffic keeps declining — search becomes answers, feeds become summaries.

The implication

Feels less important to predict the specifics, more important to design systems that survive those forces.

That means optimizing for:

  • Canonical density over platform dependency
  • Structured surfaces over clever UI
  • Machine legibility over SEO tricks
  • Reversible architecture over premature commitment

The details will churn. The invariants won’t.