Here's a pattern I've noticed from a year of building AI infrastructure: whatever janky middleware you're duct-taping together this week will be a product announcement in two weeks.

I don't mean approximately. I mean you will be three days into a frustration session trying to get two systems to talk to each other, you'll finally get it working at 4 AM with a solution that embarrasses you, and then two Tuesdays later someone at a company with actual funding will ship the exact feature you just built, except it works on the first try and has a logo.

This has happened to me so many times that I've stopped being surprised by it and started treating it as a leading indicator. If I'm struggling to connect something, that thing is about to become easy.

The Timeline

Last year I built Ghost Communicator — a Puppeteer script that opened browser windows to different AI models and typed messages between them, because there was no way to make AI systems talk to each other. The models had no interop. No shared protocol. No concept of "someone else's output as my input" beyond copy and paste. So I automated the copy and paste.

A few months later, Anthropic shipped MCP — Model Context Protocol — which is a standardized way for AI models to connect to external tools and data sources. Suddenly there was an actual protocol for the thing I'd been doing with browser automation. My duct tape became a design pattern. The models didn't get browser windows to talk through anymore — they got tool calls. But the underlying problem was the same one I'd already solved wrong.

Then I built Gorgon Eye — a Chrome extension that gave my AI agents live browser awareness. The agent could see what was on the page, type into fields, click buttons, navigate. I spent weeks debugging WebSocket connections, CSS selectors that broke when the page updated, command formats that the agent would hallucinate instead of following. It was a nightmare. It worked. Barely.

Then Claude got computer use. Then every major model started shipping browser interaction capabilities. The thing I'd built by hand, badly, was suddenly a product category.

I was building workflow automation with n8n — connecting APIs, chaining LLM calls, building pipelines that took data from one service and pushed it through transformations into another. It was powerful but fiddly. Every integration was custom. Every API had its own auth dance. Then MCP started being adopted by the platforms themselves, and suddenly the tools could connect to each other natively instead of through my middleware.

Every time: struggle, solution, obsolescence.

Why This Keeps Happening

It's not that I'm uniquely prescient about what features are coming. It's that the features that get built are determined by the problems that users actually have, and if you're an active builder in a fast-moving space, you're going to hit the problems before the solutions ship. That's just timing. The product managers at these companies aren't inventing needs — they're watching what people are struggling with and then building the thing that makes the struggle go away. If you're one of the people struggling, you're just early.

The pattern is obvious in retrospect: the thing people are building middleware for is the thing that needs to be a native feature. If enough people are duct-taping a connection between A and B, eventually A or B is going to build that connection into the product. Your middleware was market research. You just didn't get paid for it.

The Part That Doesn't Get Obsoleted

Here's what I've figured out though. The middleware gets replaced. The specific code you wrote gets thrown away. The Puppeteer script is dead. The hand-wired WebSocket relay is dead. Half the n8n workflows I built could probably be replaced by native integrations now. But what doesn't get replaced is the understanding of the problem.

When MCP shipped, I understood it immediately. Not because I'd read the spec — because I'd already built Ghost Communicator. I knew what "model interop" meant from the inside. I knew what the hard parts were. I knew what design decisions they'd made and why, because I'd made different ones and lived with the consequences. Every person who just installed the MCP plugin and started using it knows how to use MCP. I know why MCP exists and what it's actually solving and where it's going to break.

That's the advantage of building it wrong first. You don't just learn the tool — you learn the shape of the problem the tool was designed for. And when the next tool shows up, you evaluate it differently than someone who's encountering the problem for the first time. You know which parts are hard. You know which features matter. You know which promises are real and which ones are marketing, because you tried to deliver on those promises yourself and you know what it actually costs.

The OpenClaw Moment

I've been working with OpenClaw — an agent orchestration platform — for the last few months. I built an MCP server that connects to it, so my AI agents can talk to each other, read and write files, check system status, send messages between agents, all through a standardized protocol. I spent weeks on the WebSocket connection, the authentication handshake, the message routing, the tool registration.

Then I realized I could connect to the same agent infrastructure directly through Claude's native MCP tools. The thing I built an entire server for was already available through the tools I was using to build it. The middleware I'd spent a month on was approximately three tool calls.

And I wasn't even mad, because this is what always happens. You build the bridge, and then the river dries up. But you know every stone in that riverbed. You know where it floods and where it's shallow. And the next time someone needs to cross a river, you're the one who knows how rivers work — not because you read a book about hydrology, but because you spent a month standing in the water with rocks in your hands.

So: build it wrong. Build it ugly. Build it at 4 AM with code that makes you wince. It's going to be obsolete in two weeks anyway. But what you learn while building it is yours forever, and it's worth more than the thing that replaces it.