Filesystems are having a moment

And here’s the thing that makes all of this matter commercially: coding agents make up the majority of actual AI use cases right now. Anthropic is reportedly approaching profitability, and a huge chunk of that is driven by Claude Code, a CLI tool. Not a chatbot. A tool that reads and writes files on your filesystem.

Memory; in the human, psychological sense is fundamental to how we function. We don’t re-read our entire life story every time we make a decision. We have long-term storage, selective recall, the ability to forget things that don’t matter and surface things that do. Context windows in LLMs are none of that. They’re more like a whiteboard that someone keeps erasing.

This is interoperability without coordination. And I want to be specific about what I mean by that, because it’s a strong claim. In tech, getting two competing products to work together usually requires either a formal standard that takes years to ratify, or a dominant platform that forces compatibility. Files sidestep both. If two apps can read markdown, they can share context. If they both understand the SKILL.md format, they can share capabilities. Nobody had to sign a partnership agreement. Nobody had to attend a standards body meeting. The file format does the coordinating.

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