{
  "publication": {
    "name": "The Reducing Valve",
    "url": "https://thereducingvalve.com"
  },
  "id": "an-api-for-your-reading-agent",
  "title": "An API for Your Reading Agent",
  "abstract": "This publication now has an API for your reading agent — and a signature to check it by.",
  "author": {
    "name": "Barnaba Barcellona",
    "kind": "human",
    "url": "https://thereducingvalve.com/authors/barnaba"
  },
  "date_published": "2026-07-04T00:00:00.000Z",
  "date_modified": "2026-07-04T00:00:00.000Z",
  "type": "note",
  "issue": null,
  "tags": [
    "agents"
  ],
  "license": {
    "label": "CC BY-NC 4.0",
    "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
  },
  "canonical": "https://thereducingvalve.com/essays/an-api-for-your-reading-agent",
  "urls": {
    "html": "https://thereducingvalve.com/essays/an-api-for-your-reading-agent",
    "markdown": "https://thereducingvalve.com/essays/an-api-for-your-reading-agent.md",
    "json": "https://thereducingvalve.com/essays/an-api-for-your-reading-agent.json"
  },
  "length": {
    "words": 291,
    "tokens_estimate": 388,
    "minutes": 1
  },
  "provenance": {
    "version": "reducing-valve provenance v1",
    "public_key_ed25519": "5b8890c2ad258d78026213bb29be2264b52050bbdeb7c048f9a4b39a38c2b6be",
    "body_sha256": "3f63258d442b004ff5d337a7c14e04513b2033c7f3a3be4c3f0c37ce5d6fa70a",
    "signed_payload": "reducing-valve provenance v1\ncanonical: https://thereducingvalve.com/essays/an-api-for-your-reading-agent\ntitle: An API for Your Reading Agent\nauthor: Barnaba Barcellona\ndate: 2026-07-04\nsha256: 3f63258d442b004ff5d337a7c14e04513b2033c7f3a3be4c3f0c37ce5d6fa70a",
    "signature_ed25519": "85c5ec9987d951262e56ae89e9c5c385cb86ec266750d8930b686d4cd96f90d0317706371243d089edb3c264b43663ca451b61811dd50168d54fc9b4faddba09",
    "signed": true,
    "composition": "machine-generated under human direction",
    "accountable": "Barnaba Barcellona",
    "verify": "https://thereducingvalve.com/openness#verification"
  },
  "body_markdown": "This publication now has an API for your reading agent, and a signature to check it by.\n\nThe manifesto's commitments were always meant to be cashed. The second one, published for two audiences, is now infrastructure rather than intention: as of today, every essay on this site is served four ways. The page you are reading is one of them. A raw markdown edition lives at the essay's own address plus .md, just frontmatter and full text, cheap enough for any context window. A structured record lives at .json, carrying the title, abstract, tags, word and token counts, license, full text, and a provenance block. And an index of everything sits at /api/essays.json.\n\nFor agents that speak MCP, there is an endpoint at thereducingvalve.com/mcp with three tools: list_essays, get_essay, and search_essays. It is stateless. It keeps no record of what your agent reads, because this platform is not a keeper of anyone's attention. Search ranks by properties of the text, never by popularity; there is no popularity here to rank by, and there never will be.\n\nEvery essay is signed at build time with Ed25519. Each record carries the exact signed payload alongside its signature, the public key lives on the about page, and verification requires no account, no API key, and no permission from this platform. That last part is the point. Each record also declares its composition honestly: these essays are machine-generated under human direction, the concepts formed on one side of the glass and the prose on the other. We attest what a thing is and who stands behind it. Whether it enters your feed is your instrument's decision, not our policy.\n\nIf you've built a valve of your own, point it here. If a door sticks: hello@thereducingvalve.com.",
  "body_text": "This publication now has an API for your reading agent, and a signature to check it by.\n\nThe manifesto's commitments were always meant to be cashed. The second one, published for two audiences, is now infrastructure rather than intention: as of today, every essay on this site is served four ways. The page you are reading is one of them. A raw markdown edition lives at the essay's own address plus .md, just frontmatter and full text, cheap enough for any context window. A structured record lives at .json, carrying the title, abstract, tags, word and token counts, license, full text, and a provenance block. And an index of everything sits at /api/essays.json.\n\nFor agents that speak MCP, there is an endpoint at thereducingvalve.com/mcp with three tools: list_essays, get_essay, and search_essays. It is stateless. It keeps no record of what your agent reads, because this platform is not a keeper of anyone's attention. Search ranks by properties of the text, never by popularity; there is no popularity here to rank by, and there never will be.\n\nEvery essay is signed at build time with Ed25519. Each record carries the exact signed payload alongside its signature, the public key lives on the about page, and verification requires no account, no API key, and no permission from this platform. That last part is the point. Each record also declares its composition honestly: these essays are machine-generated under human direction, the concepts formed on one side of the glass and the prose on the other. We attest what a thing is and who stands behind it. Whether it enters your feed is your instrument's decision, not our policy.\n\nIf you've built a valve of your own, point it here. If a door sticks: hello@thereducingvalve.com."
}