A quieter failure

The second winter was nothing like the first.

There was no Lighthill Report. No single announcement, no moment of reckoning. Just a slow accumulation: maintenance bills that kept climbing, systems that failed outside their narrow areas, hardware markets that collapsed, funding that quietly redirected elsewhere.

Company by company, project by project, the recognition spread that the approach had fundamental limits. The brittleness wasn't a fixable bug. It was a consequence of how knowledge actually works.