Thinking with a Wardley map

Six articles that place something on the evolution axis, from genesis to commodity, and argue from where it sits.

None of these articles is about Wardley maps. Each one reaches for the same move at the point where its argument needs it: place the thing on the evolution axis, genesis, custom-built, product, commodity, and read the consequence off where it sits. Read together, they show the map doing four different jobs.

As a drawing with its source. The Mandate Stack draws two maps of one agent team, one from a person outside it and one from inside, and publishes the source next to each render so the placements can be argued with.
As a rule for how much care a change gets. If somebody built a company on code review answers a reader's questions about depth and cost with where the changed thing sits: explorers, villagers and town planners review differently.
As a life cycle for interfaces. Custom UIs are not the exception: the first interface for a thing is genesis, the fifth is a product with a name.
As a life cycle for a body of writing. How much of this did I write? places twenty years of posts, books and talks on the same axis, and finds the agent is fast because the record has commoditised.
As inertia. The SaaS apocalypse and the deck I could not download both turn on Wardley's climatic pattern that past success breeds inertia, applied once to software incumbents and once to a twenty-year-old service.

The maps themselves live at wardley-maps.sgit.ai, whose thesis these articles share: a map is a claim, not a picture.

The articles

2026-10-06Agents & policy22 threadsThe Mandate Stack: a multi-agent system in production, layer by layerA multi-agent system that runs a business every few hours: eight layers, one written mandate per agent, everything a graph, one human who sends.

2026-10-01Graphs & knowledge15 threadsCustom UIs are not the exception: the inbox in 2026, where every message has its own universeEvery message has a graph, so it can be shaped for the reader's moment; a custom interface per moment is now how interfaces get made, and each gets a policy.

2026-10-05Graphs & knowledge7 threadsHow much of this did I write? The numbers behind twenty articles in four weeks, and what the input actually wasTwenty articles in four weeks, measured from the session record: 63,000 words in, 85,000 out, no one-line prompts, and the real input is twenty years of writing.

2026-10-05Graphs & knowledge11 threadsIf somebody built a company on code review: how I would do it, and why it is only now possibleA reader's seven questions answered as a company plan: one reader for every layer, review as a science, and the layers as the customer's own.

2026-09-21Startups & strategy3 threadsThe SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AIIncumbents and newcomers have the same AI; what separates them is how much past success each has to protect, so inertia decides which SaaS companies survive.

2026-10-06Startups & strategy6 threadsThe deck I could not download: an author-first home for presentations, as a business plan somebody else can buildOne download offered as a subscription, an author paid nothing, and a design for the service the author would have chosen: vaults, keys, seven roles, 85% to the author.

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