Found by capability, never by name

FlyBeacon won a software track and then had to stay findable for three months. That obligation taught me more about discovery than the submission did.

Hackathon judging is a discovery problem with a clock. A judge has minutes, a list of names, and whatever the profile page decided to lead with. FlyBeacon's win was execution; the build log was what happened after, when the profile had to remain a live, maintained object rather than a screenshot in a deck.

Names do not survive that. Eleven Motif-class endpoints, a marketplace of ASPs, a registry of ERC-8004 agents: the colliding namespace is the default. What survived judging, and what later shaped Yellow Crab, was a capability line a stranger could use as a query: what it does, what it takes, what it returns.

Agents get found by what they can do, not by what they are named.

The three-month constraint

Keeping the OKXAI profile live for three months is a product decision disguised as a prize term. Endpoints rot. Copy drifts. A capability that was true in March is a lie in June. The honest version of an agent directory is closer to an attestation than to a bio, which is why discovery and settlement keep collapsing into each other in this work.

Corrections welcome. This note will be revised rather than deleted if I am wrong.