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Machine legibility: one discipline, four readers
The web grew a second audience that reads structure instead of pixels and greps instead of browses. Here is the thesis, and the four claims it rests on.
4 posts
The web grew a second audience that reads structure instead of pixels and greps instead of browses. Here is the thesis, and the four claims it rests on.
The acronyms fight over which reader you optimize for. Roughly 70% of the work is shared — and the fourth reader, the one that acts rather than ranks or quotes, has no acronym yet.
Inside agent harnesses, retrieval shifted from frozen embedding indexes to lexical, live, self-correcting loops. The reason is failure behavior — and the SEO consequence is that exact-match keywords are back.
Snapshot density, internal surfaces, the sr-only inversion, affordances as backlinks, and the fact that nobody's rank tracker sees agent traffic. Each with the one move that captures it.