For twenty years I’ve had the same argument in different rooms: with product teams optimizing engagement, with boards optimizing quarterly ROI, with brilliant engineers optimizing food-delivery latency. The argument is never about the work — it’s about the direction. Does this look up or down?
I finally wrote the whole argument down. It’s now a permanent page on this site: The APILama Tech Manifesto.
The short version is three steps. Step 1: automate the mundane. The measure of great technology is not daily active users — it’s how many hours of human life it returns. Agentic AI is the first real chance we’ve had to automate the logistics of existence at scale. Step 2: build pan-human infrastructure. The Agora, ARPANET, CERN, the Human Genome Project, the COVID vaccines — everything decisive we’ve ever built came from aligning behind a common goal instead of fragmenting across a thousand walled gardens. Fusion, AGI, and robotics deserve that model. Step 3: the 200-year moonshot. An AI designed not to write better code, but to accelerate our understanding of the universe itself. An AI that reads the world.
Perhaps civilizations don’t go extinct from asteroids or wars. They go extinct from comfort. The Great Filter is the inability to escape the gravity of the mundane.
The manifesto is also a commitment — about the companies I’ll build, the teams I’ll back, and the world I want to hand to my daughter. I’m publishing it so you can hold me to it.
Look up.
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