March 10, 2026
Semantic Layers Are Overrated
Someone told me recently that “Claude.md is the ontology for AI-assisted coding.” It was meant as a compliment to the practice of writing comprehensive context files for coding agents. But it made me think about ontologies. And then about semantic layers. And then about every other time the industry convinced itself that one big abstraction layer would tame complexity.
It never works. Not the way we hope.
The Silver Bullet Pattern
Every generation of enterprise technology produces its own version of the same idea: build one comprehensive thing, and the complexity goes away.
