start here · the argument
Everything we build keeps the steps and throws away what they were for. Semantic infrastructure keeps the meaning instead, and works the steps out from it.
Once the meaning is what you keep, the part that turns it into something a machine can run doesn't have to be fixed. It can be swapped, like a lens — the same meaning, read a different way, for a different machine. This page is about why that matters, and what it makes easy that is very hard today.
underneath it
semantic infrastructure · the language
Every programming language ever made writes down the steps, and never what they were for. This is the story of one that works the other way round: you write down what you mean, and the computer works out the steps.
It is where this whole idea started, and it is the first piece of semantic infrastructure being built.
semantic infrastructure · the toy
Getting a computer to do several things at once is one of the hardest parts of programming today, and the source of its strangest bugs. Here it is one word.
This page is a switch you can flip to watch the difference, and a short explanation of why it is safe.
the exercise
Take something that works, and ask which parts are actually holding it up — what it is really for. Then ask what would be left if we kept just that, instead of all the steps.
Try it across computing and the same thing turns up every time: we throw the meaning away to save effort, then spend far more effort guessing it back.
the surface
None of this is built yet. This page is a map of where it could reach if it were — from the computers we use every day, to medicine, to the animals, to the sky.
Some of it is close. Some of it is a long way off, and it says so.
COMING SOON The name is kept. The page behind it is still being written.