Stacked

By fall 2026, the compound improvement loop — agents building tools that other agents use to build better tools — has crossed from research into production infrastructure. Karpathy AutoResearch runs 700 experiments in 48 hours. Tools built by strong agents triple weaker agents performance. Skill libraries accumulate across sessions and transfer across foundation models. The ecosystem has 20,000+ MCP servers growing at 2,200% annually. The five primitives needed to govern this system — lineage tracking, compositional trust, value attribution, trajectory-to-skill standardization, and cross-layer optimization propagation — form a dependency chain where each requires the previous one to function. Lineage tracking must exist before value attribution can be accurate. Compositional trust requires lineage as input. The result is a recursive economy where some organizations build governance infrastructure proactively and gain compounding advantages while others wait for incidents to force standards development. The stacking rewards both the capability builders and the governance builders — the question is which arrives first at each organization.