In the late 2000s, “ mobile-first ” emerged as a design discipline. The argument was a single sentence: don’t design for the big screen and squeeze it down. Start with the small screen, the harder constraint, the one that forces you to figure out what actually matters. If it works on a phone, it works everywhere. Google leaned in early. By February 2010, Eric Schmidt was telling Mobile World Congress that Google’s strategy was “Mobile First in everything.” In April 2015, the Mobilegeddon update penalized non-mobile-friendly websites at scale. In October 2016, StatCounter reported mobile traffic surpassing desktop globally for the first time . A month later, Google announced mobile-first indexing . By October 2023, that migration was complete . The web is now standing at the same kind of inflection point. Except the harder constraint isn’t a small screen. It’s no screen at all. It’s a machine.…