6 ms·

"Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. (To be entirely clear, not because agents won't be a relevant thing, althoug

by Latty 4mo ago

"Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. (To be entirely clear, not because agents won't be a relevant thing, although certainly I have my doubts, but because I believe even if they are a relevant thing, requiring special allowances from sites undermines the whole point, and such things will only end up used by bad actors to mismatch what agents see to what humans see, and so will be intentionally ignored.)

kijin 4mo ago
Yeah, the entire suite of proposed "standards" catering to agents looks like a temporary measure to duct-tape over the limitations and token costs of today's agents. They'll churn as quickly as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. can release new versions of their frontier models.
- locknitpicker 4mo ago
  > Yeah, the entire suite of proposed "standards" catering to agents looks like a temporary measure to duct-tape over the limitations and token costs of today's agents. That's fine. We need a fix for today's problems today.
  - kijin 4mo ago
    True, that's fine. As long as people don't elevate these transient "standards" to the same level as something like basic security and accessibility.
    - locknitpicker 4mo ago
      > True, that's fine. As long as people don't elevate these transient "standards" to the same level as something like basic security and accessibility. I don't think that's it at all, and I'm baffled as the suggestion it is. These things are just formats for ad-hoc interfaces to help share context used by agents. It's in the same vein of designing cli apps with progressive disclosure in mind.
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    Let's just not get blinded by this to the true nature of the problem. The web being hard for agents isn't an accident - it was done on purpose. More specifically, it's a consequence of the web evolving to defeat automation and limit access. Most websites are exist to make money from specific audiences in specific ways, often defined in contracts between hundreds of business entities, and none of them want you to be able to automate access, or interact with the website in any way other than the one that spins the money-making machine. Consider that the flip side of "basic tabular interface" is "skip website entirely, access underlying database"; the flip side of "screen readers" is "ad blockers"; the flip side of APIs is "competitors can scrape my listings and use them against me", etc. Agents are hot right now, the whole business side is still blinded by hype, so things like MCP and .md endpoints are not just getting a pass, but are even pursued by the business people ("we have to do something with AI!"). This won't last long, though - they'll soon realize their mistake, close off access, and enshittify the web some more. Just like they did in the past - e.g. when APIs and mashups briefly became a hot thing, then went away as businesses realized this defeats the very thing that makes them money: total control over platform/user channel. -- [0] - Even your most basic blog showing some ads creates a money-making chain, made up of dozens or hundreds of business entities, bound by actual contracts, and the "blog author that just wants to show some ads" is merely one party at the end of that chain.
  - Mordisquitos 4mo ago
    > That's fine. We need a fix for today's problems today. No, we don't. It is Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. who need a fix for those problems today. Let them deal with it.
    - locknitpicker 4mo ago
      > No, we don't. It is Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. who need a fix for those problems today. Let them deal with it. I don't think you understand what an instruction files or a agent skill is. They are nothing more than glorified custom prompts that are automatically integrated in sessions by the user agent. The likes of Anthropic are paid either way. It's not Anthropic et al who seek to do less work to get models to do their work, nor do they care if prompts are shared. At most it is a minor UX improvement, and one which is shared across AI vendors.
k1m 4mo ago
With how bloated and ad-ridden websites have become, I'd love the pure text version for us humans - let the agents deal with stuff intended for us. But I also have my doubts we'll see that. Regarding the bad actors point, that's been possible for a long time - e.g. serving up different content for search engine crawlers than the user sees when they click through. If I remember correctly, there was a time Google penalised sites that did this.
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  This is what reader mode is. It exists purely because most websites are unreadable.
  - k1m 4mo ago
    Big fan of reader mode. For me, a direction better than llms.txt would be to encourage sites to improve their markup (think semantic web era) so agents could get the text version from that the way reader mode does. Would achieve the same thing - save tokens. This isn't difficult and I think the reason it hasn't been done is that publishers want clicks and ad views. Which begs the question: why would they start doing it for agents?
    - 0-_-0 4mo ago
      Agents don't buy stuff they see in an ad
      - Retr0id 4mo ago
        So why serve them at all?
        Gigachad 4mo ago
        If your website itself is advertising a product or service you sell you would still want LLMs to see and fetch it. If you are a news site, blog, or any other website that doesn’t exist to sell something, you are only harmed by ai agents.
neya 4mo ago
I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web. Fuck all these specifications, just give me the raw HTML that isn't obfuscated by your shitty/shiny new JS framework that you swear will change the game (looking at you, React)
- Matl 4mo ago
  I too want to go back to that, but I fear most consumers/potential visitors to your website have been conditioned to expect flashy web by this point and so it's a self reinforcing paradigm.
  - cutler 4mo ago
    Nothing has changed. The "flashy web" of the 2000s was ... Flash. Corporates paid premium rates to Flash Designers who couldn't write a line of HTML.
    - jfengel 4mo ago
      Oh God I hated that. I'm not entirely sure why I hate it so much more than over-Javascripted sites. It feels even more alien.
  - assimpleaspossi 4mo ago
    I wonder, though, if there are those who notice a simple, comfortable page.
- yolo3000 4mo ago
  I interviewed someone once for a fullstack role, gave him a mockup of a screen we had to build and asked how he would do it, in short some things on top of other things. The only thing he managed to say was how he would divide everything into components. I thought man, so many devs don't even know how to use html/css anymore, but who's laughing now, you just need to prompt a coding agent.
ninjalanternshk 4mo ago
Make the keywords meta tag great again.
singpolyma3 4mo ago
I'd like to agree but I said the same thing about "mobile specific website" and somehow that's still a thing...
scottswilliams 4mo ago
Agent readiness seems like an entirely helpful step. People aren't using blockchains on my websites but they are using AI, and AI do not need to use websites like humans. Humans want to see a good-looking website, even just raw HTML. An agent doesn't even need that, ideally they would just see the content of the page in markdown. Why not have an agent version? It saves the client agent and the website host time and money. It would be nice if there was a standard like llms.txt to specify "agents should instead visit this mirror of the website that is a raw markdown version of what humans see" Also, part of agent readiness on this website is the AI equivalent of SEO (or the opposite if you don't want your website being crawled for AI).
- nozzlegear 4mo ago
  If you have an "agent ready" site, will humans even use it? Why would they visit your site if an AI can just scrape it or MCP it or whatever with a 10 foot pole, while their human sits in ChatGPT/Claude and waits for the results? You might as well just build an API or CLI instead of a website and skip the ceremony.
- SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
  > Why not have an agent version? Why have one? There are no benefits, and innumerable downsides. > It saves the client agent and the website host time and money. I do not care about the users' budget, if they don't want to spend a trillion dollars they can just read a website like everyone used to. As for my own hosting budget, the AI scraper bots consume 2 or more orders of magnitude more bandwidth than the AI agents, it's utterly irrelevant to aid them. > Also, part of agent readiness on this website is the AI equivalent of SEO SEO is dead. Click-through rates have crumbled. AI bots and agents don't provide ad impressions, so revenues are crashing as well. And the flood of AI slop has made Google significantly more aggressive in "shadowbanning" anything that even remotely looks like what the AI sloppers are doing at any given moment.
TeMPOraL 4mo ago
> "Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. I was going to counter that, but thinking some more, I actually agree, but for slightly different reasons. > not because agents won't be a relevant thing, (...) but because (...) requiring special allowances from sites undermines the whole point, and such things will only end up used by bad actors to mismatch what agents see to what humans see, and so will be intentionally ignored. My perspective is that I see web as adversarial, and from my perspective most of the parties operating web sites are themselves bad actors. Mismatching what humans and agents see is something that we'll see intentionally used by websites, same as they do to search engines. No, I think "Agent Readiness" won't age well because website operators will soon remember that "agents" are just "access automation", i.e. the very thing they're continuously at war against, as this threatens their ability to make money.
- brookst 4mo ago
  > most of the parties operating web sites are themselves bad actors Wait, what? “Most” by percentage of people who operate at least one website, or by percentage of websites that are “bad”? The latter maaaybe, given auto-generated web spam (“words-with-seven-letters-and-2-ms.html”)? But to the extent some hotels, airlines, retailers, etc, decide they don’t want my agent and will only sell to me if I personally drive the web browser… sorry, my agent will shop elsewhere. Economics change, since an agent can comparison shop exhaustively in a way I can’t, but at the end of the day I expect the accountants device that any sale is better than no sale.
- k1m 4mo ago
  I think this is the main problem many are overlooking. Much of the fear for website owners that's leading them to block all automated access is simply that their business model relies on humans visiting the site. They're not sitting around wondering how they can make their site more accessible to people and their agents.
culi 4mo ago
If anyone thinks the site is overall a good idea but doesn't want the ai/blockchain nonsense, you should know checklists like these are fairly common. My favorite for a few years now has been this https://frontendchecklist.io/rules https://frontendchecklist.io/rules
- hoistbypetard 4mo ago
  Looking at their repository, they're taking it that direction: https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist/blob/main/CLAUDE.md https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist/blob/mai...
dormento 4mo ago
You know, there are many places around here that serve coke with a slice of lemon. In some of them, it comes by default: if you don't specify, there will be a slice of lemon on your glass. You can ask to hold the lemon, and even then, sometimes it will be there. "No biggie, I can just remove the slice of lemon, but man does it get tiresome after a while". This is how I feel with this agents crap.

by Latty 4mo ago

kijin 4mo ago

Yeah, the entire suite of proposed "standards" catering to agents looks like a temporary measure to duct-tape over the limitations and token costs of today's agents. They'll churn as quickly as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. can release new versions of their frontier models.

locknitpicker 4mo ago
> Yeah, the entire suite of proposed "standards" catering to agents looks like a temporary measure to duct-tape over the limitations and token costs of today's agents. That's fine. We need a fix for today's problems today.
- kijin 4mo ago
  True, that's fine. As long as people don't elevate these transient "standards" to the same level as something like basic security and accessibility.
  - locknitpicker 4mo ago
    > True, that's fine. As long as people don't elevate these transient "standards" to the same level as something like basic security and accessibility. I don't think that's it at all, and I'm baffled as the suggestion it is. These things are just formats for ad-hoc interfaces to help share context used by agents. It's in the same vein of designing cli apps with progressive disclosure in mind.
- TeMPOraL 4mo ago
  Let's just not get blinded by this to the true nature of the problem. The web being hard for agents isn't an accident - it was done on purpose. More specifically, it's a consequence of the web evolving to defeat automation and limit access. Most websites are exist to make money from specific audiences in specific ways, often defined in contracts between hundreds of business entities, and none of them want you to be able to automate access, or interact with the website in any way other than the one that spins the money-making machine. Consider that the flip side of "basic tabular interface" is "skip website entirely, access underlying database"; the flip side of "screen readers" is "ad blockers"; the flip side of APIs is "competitors can scrape my listings and use them against me", etc. Agents are hot right now, the whole business side is still blinded by hype, so things like MCP and .md endpoints are not just getting a pass, but are even pursued by the business people ("we have to do something with AI!"). This won't last long, though - they'll soon realize their mistake, close off access, and enshittify the web some more. Just like they did in the past - e.g. when APIs and mashups briefly became a hot thing, then went away as businesses realized this defeats the very thing that makes them money: total control over platform/user channel. -- [0] - Even your most basic blog showing some ads creates a money-making chain, made up of dozens or hundreds of business entities, bound by actual contracts, and the "blog author that just wants to show some ads" is merely one party at the end of that chain.
- Mordisquitos 4mo ago
  > That's fine. We need a fix for today's problems today. No, we don't. It is Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. who need a fix for those problems today. Let them deal with it.
  - locknitpicker 4mo ago
    > No, we don't. It is Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. who need a fix for those problems today. Let them deal with it. I don't think you understand what an instruction files or a agent skill is. They are nothing more than glorified custom prompts that are automatically integrated in sessions by the user agent. The likes of Anthropic are paid either way. It's not Anthropic et al who seek to do less work to get models to do their work, nor do they care if prompts are shared. At most it is a minor UX improvement, and one which is shared across AI vendors.

k1m 4mo ago

With how bloated and ad-ridden websites have become, I'd love the pure text version for us humans - let the agents deal with stuff intended for us. But I also have my doubts we'll see that. Regarding the bad actors point, that's been possible for a long time - e.g. serving up different content for search engine crawlers than the user sees when they click through. If I remember correctly, there was a time Google penalised sites that did this.

Gigachad 4mo ago
This is what reader mode is. It exists purely because most websites are unreadable.
- k1m 4mo ago
  Big fan of reader mode. For me, a direction better than llms.txt would be to encourage sites to improve their markup (think semantic web era) so agents could get the text version from that the way reader mode does. Would achieve the same thing - save tokens. This isn't difficult and I think the reason it hasn't been done is that publishers want clicks and ad views. Which begs the question: why would they start doing it for agents?
  - 0-_-0 4mo ago
    Agents don't buy stuff they see in an ad
    - Retr0id 4mo ago
      So why serve them at all?
      - Gigachad 4mo ago
        If your website itself is advertising a product or service you sell you would still want LLMs to see and fetch it. If you are a news site, blog, or any other website that doesn’t exist to sell something, you are only harmed by ai agents.

neya 4mo ago

I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web. Fuck all these specifications, just give me the raw HTML that isn't obfuscated by your shitty/shiny new JS framework that you swear will change the game (looking at you, React)

Matl 4mo ago
I too want to go back to that, but I fear most consumers/potential visitors to your website have been conditioned to expect flashy web by this point and so it's a self reinforcing paradigm.
- cutler 4mo ago
  Nothing has changed. The "flashy web" of the 2000s was ... Flash. Corporates paid premium rates to Flash Designers who couldn't write a line of HTML.
  - jfengel 4mo ago
    Oh God I hated that. I'm not entirely sure why I hate it so much more than over-Javascripted sites. It feels even more alien.
- assimpleaspossi 4mo ago
  I wonder, though, if there are those who notice a simple, comfortable page.
yolo3000 4mo ago
I interviewed someone once for a fullstack role, gave him a mockup of a screen we had to build and asked how he would do it, in short some things on top of other things. The only thing he managed to say was how he would divide everything into components. I thought man, so many devs don't even know how to use html/css anymore, but who's laughing now, you just need to prompt a coding agent.

ninjalanternshk 4mo ago

Make the keywords meta tag great again.

singpolyma3 4mo ago

I'd like to agree but I said the same thing about "mobile specific website" and somehow that's still a thing...

scottswilliams 4mo ago

Agent readiness seems like an entirely helpful step. People aren't using blockchains on my websites but they are using AI, and AI do not need to use websites like humans. Humans want to see a good-looking website, even just raw HTML. An agent doesn't even need that, ideally they would just see the content of the page in markdown. Why not have an agent version? It saves the client agent and the website host time and money. It would be nice if there was a standard like llms.txt to specify "agents should instead visit this mirror of the website that is a raw markdown version of what humans see" Also, part of agent readiness on this website is the AI equivalent of SEO (or the opposite if you don't want your website being crawled for AI).

nozzlegear 4mo ago
If you have an "agent ready" site, will humans even use it? Why would they visit your site if an AI can just scrape it or MCP it or whatever with a 10 foot pole, while their human sits in ChatGPT/Claude and waits for the results? You might as well just build an API or CLI instead of a website and skip the ceremony.
SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
> Why not have an agent version? Why have one? There are no benefits, and innumerable downsides. > It saves the client agent and the website host time and money. I do not care about the users' budget, if they don't want to spend a trillion dollars they can just read a website like everyone used to. As for my own hosting budget, the AI scraper bots consume 2 or more orders of magnitude more bandwidth than the AI agents, it's utterly irrelevant to aid them. > Also, part of agent readiness on this website is the AI equivalent of SEO SEO is dead. Click-through rates have crumbled. AI bots and agents don't provide ad impressions, so revenues are crashing as well. And the flood of AI slop has made Google significantly more aggressive in "shadowbanning" anything that even remotely looks like what the AI sloppers are doing at any given moment.

TeMPOraL 4mo ago

> "Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. I was going to counter that, but thinking some more, I actually agree, but for slightly different reasons. > not because agents won't be a relevant thing, (...) but because (...) requiring special allowances from sites undermines the whole point, and such things will only end up used by bad actors to mismatch what agents see to what humans see, and so will be intentionally ignored. My perspective is that I see web as adversarial, and from my perspective most of the parties operating web sites are themselves bad actors. Mismatching what humans and agents see is something that we'll see intentionally used by websites, same as they do to search engines. No, I think "Agent Readiness" won't age well because website operators will soon remember that "agents" are just "access automation", i.e. the very thing they're continuously at war against, as this threatens their ability to make money.

brookst 4mo ago
> most of the parties operating web sites are themselves bad actors Wait, what? “Most” by percentage of people who operate at least one website, or by percentage of websites that are “bad”? The latter maaaybe, given auto-generated web spam (“words-with-seven-letters-and-2-ms.html”)? But to the extent some hotels, airlines, retailers, etc, decide they don’t want my agent and will only sell to me if I personally drive the web browser… sorry, my agent will shop elsewhere. Economics change, since an agent can comparison shop exhaustively in a way I can’t, but at the end of the day I expect the accountants device that any sale is better than no sale.
k1m 4mo ago
I think this is the main problem many are overlooking. Much of the fear for website owners that's leading them to block all automated access is simply that their business model relies on humans visiting the site. They're not sitting around wondering how they can make their site more accessible to people and their agents.

culi 4mo ago

If anyone thinks the site is overall a good idea but doesn't want the ai/blockchain nonsense, you should know checklists like these are fairly common. My favorite for a few years now has been this https://frontendchecklist.io/rules https://frontendchecklist.io/rules

hoistbypetard 4mo ago
Looking at their repository, they're taking it that direction: https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist/blob/main/CLAUDE.md https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist/blob/mai...

dormento 4mo ago

You know, there are many places around here that serve coke with a slice of lemon. In some of them, it comes by default: if you don't specify, there will be a slice of lemon on your glass. You can ask to hold the lemon, and even then, sometimes it will be there. "No biggie, I can just remove the slice of lemon, but man does it get tiresome after a while". This is how I feel with this agents crap.