🌱 - A collection of sprouting thoughts.
I used to work at a vector database company. My entire job was helping people understand why they needed a database purpose-built for AI; embeddings, semantic search, the whole thing. So it's a little funny that I'm writing this. But here I am, watching everyone in the AI ecosystem suddenly rediscover the humble filesystem, and I think they might be onto something bigger than most people realize.
Not bigger than databases. Different from databases. I need to say that upfront because I already know someone is going to read this and think I'm saying "files good, databases bad." I'm not. Stay with me.
Everyone is talking about files
If you've been paying any attention to the AI agent space over the last few months, you've noticed something strange. LlamaIndex published "Files Are All You Need." LangChain wrote about how agents can use filesystems for context engineering. Oracle, yes Oracle (who is cooking btw), put out a piece comparing filesystems and databases for agent memory. Dan Abramov wrote about a social filesystem built on the AT Protocol. Archil is building cloud volumes specifically because agents want POSIX file systems.
Jerry Liu from LlamaIndex put it bluntly: instead of one agent with hundreds of tools, we're moving toward a world where the agent has access to a filesystem and maybe 5-10 tools. That's it. Filesystem, code interpreter, web access. And that's as general, if not more general than an agent with 100+ MCP tools.
Karpathy made the adjacent observation that stuck with me. He pointed out that Claude Code works because it runs on your computer, with your environment, your data, your context. It's not a website you go to — it's a little spirit that lives on your machine. OpenAI got this wrong, he argued, by focusing on cloud deployments in containers orchestrated from ChatGPT instead of simply running on localhost.
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.
Context windows aren't memory
Here's where I think most of the discourse misses the deeper point.
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