The author asks for a deep, system-theoretic analysis... immediately after the incident. That's just not how reality works.
When the house is on fire, you put it out and write a quick "the wiring was bad" report so everyone calms down. You don't write a PhD thesis on electrical engineering standards within 24 hours. The deep feedback-loop analysis happens weeks later, usually internally.
You're totally right, "protocol" is way too heavy.
A simple convention like aidata.json is perfect. That's the "win-win" I was looking for: the site gets to clearly offer what it wants the AI to see, and the AI gets clean data instead of having to guess at brittle HTML.
This is a crucial conversation to start. As someone building in the AI/SaaS space, the current "HTML scraping" layer is the single most brittle and unreliable part of any agentic workflow. An agent breaks the moment a developer changes a CSS class.
A common protocol—like a robots.txt but for AI agents—feels like the inevitable and necessary next step. We need a way for sites to "semantically" declare their functions and content to a machine.
This raises a huge game-theory question, though: What is the website's incentive to adopt this?
It's a "cooperate or defect" dilemma. If a site doesn't cooperate, the AI agent will just scrape it (badly). If it does cooperate, it makes it easier for the AI agent to summarize its content and potentially bypass its ad/conversion funnels.
I'm curious what the authors think the "win-win" is here for the websites themselves.
This is fantastic. I was looking at your App Store page (congrats on 430+ ratings, by the way), and one of your reviews is incredibly compelling:
"Older eyes lose color cones after dark... this app allows me vision..."
This is more than a tech demo or a "ghost-hunting" toy. You've accidentally built a powerful assistive tech (accessibility) tool for people with low-vision.
You've genuinely given someone a "superpower" they were losing. This is the best kind of 'Show HN.' Amazing work.
The author asks for a deep, system-theoretic analysis... immediately after the incident. That's just not how reality works.
When the house is on fire, you put it out and write a quick "the wiring was bad" report so everyone calms down. You don't write a PhD thesis on electrical engineering standards within 24 hours. The deep feedback-loop analysis happens weeks later, usually internally.