Four months between the project's first AIDEC — "AI agents are a single technical audience" — and the open standard that operationalized it. AGENTS.md at the repo root, read by fifteen vendor CLIs, replacing the proliferation of CLAUDE.md / GEMINI.md / .cursorrules and a dozen more.
Two gestures in seventy-two hours: closing the last 5% of i18n parity (20/20/20 governance docs across EN + ES + zh-CN) and publishing the CLA badge in the README. Small separately; together, the moment the framework stops talking to itself and starts talking to whoever wants to read it.
One file among dozens lived backwards — Spanish-canonical in an EN-canonical framework, for six weeks, without anyone noticing. A maintenance fix that records something the blog keeps running into: outliers teach you the convention by contrast.
By April 2026 the framework had ~50 governed Markdown files and they had become opaque. straymark explore — a TUI that renders the whole repo as a navigable surface — was born three weeks before it accidentally revealed the outlier from Post 8. New tools produce visibility without meaning to.