Modern software engineering solved a problem that content operations are only now rediscovering: you can't maintain one artifact per target platform. Compilers figured this out decades ago. Instead of writing assembly by hand for every chip, they introduced an intermediate representation (IR) — a canonical form that sits between source code and machine code, letting one frontend feed many backends.
Content teams are living in the pre-compiler era. Every platform gets its own hand-written artifact, and the maintenance cost compounds with every channel you add. The fix isn't more tools. It's an IR for content.
The Problem: N × M Artifacts
The math is brutal. One campaign idea, five platforms (X, LinkedIn, a blog, a newsletter, a video script) — that's five artifacts to write, format, schedule, and keep consistent. Add a sixth platform and you're not maintaining one more file; you're maintaining a new encoding of every idea that moves through your pipeline.
This is exactly the problem compiler designers faced in the 1980s. Porting a language to a new chip meant rewriting the entire backend. The solution was to split the pipeline:
