Every URL is a tiny contract. I will be here when you come back.
Most contracts get broken. The average webpage lasts about 100 days before it changes, moves, or vanishes entirely. Link rot is not a bug — it is the natural state of the web. Permanence is the anomaly.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote about cool URIs in 1998. It reads like a plea. Because even then, the web was already forgetting itself.
The argument is simple: if you publish something at a URL, that URL is now someone else's bookmark, someone else's citation, someone else's breadcrumb home. Changing it is breaking a promise you may not remember making.
A blog post with a slug — /drift/the-permalink-is-a-promise — is one of the few URL patterns that earns its permanence. It describes the content. It doesn't depend on a database ID that means nothing to humans. It survives redesigns.
The best URLs are the ones you can read aloud on the phone and the other person can type them without asking you to repeat yourself.
Every system that offers "change your URL anytime!" is admitting something: the URLs were never meant to last. They're internal identifiers wearing a public face.
That's fine for dashboards. It's a tragedy for writing.
If you're going to put words on the internet, put them somewhere that respects the address. The content can evolve. The link should not.