Eliminating Infrastructure Abstraction Through Known Intent: The Three-Tier Principle

We demonstrate that runtime infrastructure layers — operating systems, serialization, scheduling, authentication, orchestration, container isolation, and network protocols — are systematically eliminable when a workload's full intent is declared at design time. The central finding is the Three-Tier Principle: infrastructure features partition into always-eliminable (~43%), conditionally-eliminable (~34%), and never-eliminable (~23%) based on the source of uncertainty they address. We validate this by analyzing seven infrastructure layers, producing 35 falsifiable claims with explicit falsification conditions, and tracing a representative storage workload through a five-phase pipeline-as-compiler mapping that collapses 7+ infrastructure components to 3 typed capability imports. The contribution is a decision framework — not a prescription — with explicit boundaries: known intent determines the boundary of eliminable abstraction.