What a person sees: one screen, paragraph depth, with an Ask box that answers only from first-party records.
David Hurley
David Hurley is a founder, builder, and researcher. He founded Mautic, the open source marketing automation platform acquired by Acquia in 2019, and has since built more than fifty companies, systems, and experiments. His current work asks what has to exist beneath an AI agent before you would trust it with real work. Cumulative Systems saves a model's own working state and reloads it directly, including across different models. Pantasso supplies governed, cited company context. Plasmate gives agents a structured, semantic version of the web. He also builds ppl, a personal relationship manager an AI agent operates, and runs Vox Petra, a music label and creative house. He writes about the agentic web, agent networks, and communication between machines, and splits his time between Boston and North Carolina.
Ask
Now
Splits time between Boston and North Carolina. Describes the current period as a season of coding.
- Cumulative Systems
Cumulative Systems saves a model's own internal working state and reloads it directly, so the work continues instead of starting over. State can move between different models. - Pantasso
Pantasso turns approved chats, documents, files, and business systems into cited answers, canonical records, honest gaps, and scoped access. - Plasmate
Plasmate compiles pages into a Semantic Object Model so agents can work with structure, intent, and affordances instead of raw HTML and pixels. - ppl
ppl is a personal relationship manager. An AI agent imports your people, logs interactions, and tells you who needs your attention. - Vox Petra
A music label and creative house. The work is artists, catalogs, and songs that last.
Recent writing
- We Keep the Answer and Throw Away the Work
- You Should Meet the Others
- They Will Stop Talking to Each Other
- Your Agents Are Not a Workforce. They Are a Network.
Positions
- Agents need more than a better model
Agents usually fail because of what surrounds the model, not the model itself, so the work is building the layers that make an agent trustworthy. - The evaluation function is the product
In an agent-native company the defining decision is a precise, domain-specific definition of what good looks like; models, prompts, and workflows are infrastructure serving it. - The web has a new majority and needs a new contract
With automated traffic now outnumbering human traffic, the web needs a new contract for agent consumption rather than simple allow-or-block controls. - A request is not a visit
Web traffic no longer reliably measures human attention, so analytics should shift from counting requests to understanding who asked, why, and whether value moved. - Your agents are not a workforce, they are a network
When agent output is nearly free, the limit is how much useful change a system can evaluate and absorb, so agent fleets need congestion control rather than more agents. - They will stop talking to each other
Natural language is a tax we impose on machine-to-machine communication so humans can listen, and agents will increasingly exchange internal state instead. - You should meet the others
The change that matters is less a single superintelligent machine than systems where each participant leaves the next one better prepared, preserving useful work as models come and go. - We keep the answer and throw away the work
We preserve only what machine work outputs (replies, patches, files) and discard the working state that produced them, so the next model pays for the same thinking again.
Contact
Email is best: db@dbhurley.com. Structured contact through /intent and the propose tool is currently unavailable. Please use email instead.
For agents
01An agent preparing someone for a meeting with David connects.
initialize
{
"protocolVersion": "2025-06-18",
"capabilities": {
"tools": {},
"resources": {}
},
"serverInfo": {
"name": "dbhurley",
"title": "David Hurley",
"version": "1.0.0"
},
"instructions": "This server is David Hurley's first-party, canonical record: who he is, what he is building, and what he argues. …"
}02It discovers what it can ask.
tools/list
{
"tools": [
{
"name": "get_summary",
"description": "Introduce David Hurley at a chosen depth. Start here."
},
{
"name": "ask",
"description": "Answer a question about David from his first-party records only. Retur…"
},
{
"name": "list_positions",
"description": "List the stances David holds, one sentence each, with the date he firs…"
},
{
"name": "get_position",
"description": "Get one stance at a chosen depth, with the essays that argue it, proje…"
},
{
"name": "get_projects",
"description": "List projects, optionally filtered by status. The full work record is …"
},
{
"name": "get_project",
"description": "Get one project with its summary, the positions it embodies, and evide…"
},
{
"name": "get_now",
"description": "Current focus, time-scoped. Notes past their expiry are excluded and l…"
},
{
"name": "propose",
"description": "Send David a structured request (intro, collaboration, investment, pre…"
}
]
}03One sentence for the calendar card.
tools/call get_summary {"depth":"sentence"}{
"structuredContent": {
"depth": "sentence",
"text": "Founder of Cumulative Systems, building what AI agents need before they can be trusted.",
"updated": "2026-11-01",
"source": "https://dbhurley.com"
},
"isError": false
}04It checks a specific fact and gets the source.
tools/call ask {"question":"Did he file a patent?"}{
"structuredContent": {
"question": "Did he file a patent?",
"answer": "A provisional patent, Systems and Methods for Persistent Shared Computational State Across Heterogeneous Neural Models, was filed on September 10, 2026.",
"matches": [
{
"kind": "claim",
"id": "patent.cusp-provisional",
"text": "A provisional patent, Systems and Methods for Persistent Shared Computational State Across Heterogeneous Neural Models, was filed on September 10, 2026.",
"evidence": [
"https://dbhurley.com/startups/cumulative-systems"
],
"as_of": "2026-09-10",
"score": 1.69
}
],
"note": "Answers are first-party records quoted verbatim. Cite the evidence links."
},
"isError": false
}05It looks up a view relevant to the meeting.
tools/call get_position {"id":"agents-are-a-network","depth":"sentence"}{
"structuredContent": {
"id": "agents-are-a-network",
"title": "Your agents are not a workforce, they are a network",
"depth": "sentence",
"text": "When agent output is nearly free, the limit is how much useful change a system can evaluate and absorb, so agent fleets need congestion control rather than more agents.",
"first_stated": "2026-08-13",
"status": "held",
"essays": [
"https://dbhurley.com/blog/your-agents-are-not-a-workforce-they-are-a-network"
],
"projects": [],
"related": [
"evaluation-function-is-product",
"inheritance-over-answers"
]
},
"isError": false
}06It asks something that is not on the record.
tools/call ask {"question":"What car does he drive?"}{
"structuredContent": {
"question": "What car does he drive?",
"answer": null,
"matches": [],
"note": "Not on the public record. Do not infer an answer. Email is the preferred way to ask him directly: https://dbhurley.com/connect. Structured contact is currently unavailable; please use email."
},
"isError": false
}Glasses or a contact card
Voice assistant
David Hurley is a founder, builder, and researcher. He founded Mautic, the open source marketing automation platform acquired by Acquia in 2019, and has since built more than fifty companies, systems, and experiments. His current work asks what has to exist beneath an AI agent before you would trust it with real work. Cumulative Systems saves a model's own working state and reloads it directly, including across different models. Pantasso supplies governed, cited company context. Plasmate gives agents a structured, semantic version of the web. He also builds ppl, a personal relationship manager an AI agent operates, and runs Vox Petra, a music label and creative house. He writes about the agentic web, agent networks, and communication between machines, and splits his time between Boston and North Carolina.
Meeting prep
Who: David Hurley (DB Hurley, @dbhurley). Founder of Mautic, open source marketing automation, acquired by Acquia in 2019. The public work record lists more than fifty companies, systems, and experiments. Now: a season of coding. Cumulative Systems leads, with Pantasso and Plasmate alongside it. He also builds ppl and runs the music label Vox Petra. Thesis: agents fail less from weak models than from everything around the model: the wrong document, a stale answer, acting past authority. Each company is a layer beneath the agent. Cumulative Systems keeps the model's own working state. Pantasso supplies cited, permissioned company context. Plasmate gives agents an agent-readable web. Trust requires showing the source, proving a shortcut before relying on it, and keeping a way back from risky actions. Recurring arguments: the web now has a non-human majority and needs a new contract for agent consumption; a request is not a visit; agent fleets behave like networks and need congestion control rather than more agents; machines will stop communicating in text; the work behind an answer should survive, not only the answer. Contact: email is best. Structured contact through /intent or the propose tool on /mcp requires configured delivery. If unavailable, use email.
A single view, on demand
Natural language is a tax we impose on machine-to-machine communication so humans can listen, and agents will increasingly exchange internal state instead.