# Problems.vc

> Notes on the agent transition, data ownership, and the infrastructure underneath. By Matt de Courcelle.

Site: https://problems.vc
Author: Matt de Courcelle
Feed: https://problems.vc/feed.xml
Full corpus: https://problems.vc/llms-full.txt

## Posts

- [The Shape the Problem Wants](https://problems.vc/posts/the-shape-the-problem-wants) — 2026-04-30 — If you were starting from scratch, what would the data substrate underneath an agent-era economy actually have to do? Three fields converge on one shape: a metagraph with cryptographic provenance and capability-mediated access.
- [Five Costumes, One Problem](https://problems.vc/posts/five-costumes-one-problem) — 2026-04-23 — A week in the life of a founder with agents in the loop on every counterparty interaction. The friction is one problem in five costumes: operational facts no one can verify — and agents have made it worse, not better.
- [Whose Data Runs the Agents?](https://problems.vc/posts/whose-data-runs-the-agents) — 2026-04-16 — The most consequential question of the agent transition isn't what agents will do. It's who owns the data they run on. The default is a multi-corporation data monopoly forming by compound interest — and it's being decided right now.
- [The Relay](https://problems.vc/posts/the-relay) — 2026-04-09 — How a universe achieves immortality. What happens when a computational universe copies itself — and why it might not need a reason to do so. The final essay in the trilogy.
- [The Zoom Problem](https://problems.vc/posts/the-zoom-problem) — 2026-04-02 — Why the deepest crisis in physics might be a category error. What happens when you try to reverse-engineer a rendering engine from inside it: the unification crisis looks like an abstraction-layer mismatch.
- [The Navigation Hypothesis](https://problems.vc/posts/the-navigation-hypothesis) — 2026-03-26 — Why the universe might be a map built by the civilization trapped inside it. The simulation argument has a motivation problem — and the most plausible reason to build a universe-scale simulation is navigation.
- [Problems](https://problems.vc/posts/problems) — 2026-03-17 — A notebook. Where I think out loud about problems worth thinking about — the agent transition, the structure of physical law, and whatever else compounds quickly and is hard to reverse — and occasionally about what I'm building next to one of them.