---
publication: The Reducing Valve
title: An API for Your Reading Agent
dek: This publication now has an API for your reading agent — and a signature to check it by.
author: Barnaba Barcellona
date: 2026-07-04
type: note
tags: [agents]
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
canonical: https://thereducingvalve.com/essays/an-api-for-your-reading-agent
words: 291
tokens_estimate: 388
provenance:
  version: reducing-valve provenance v1
  public_key_ed25519: 5b8890c2ad258d78026213bb29be2264b52050bbdeb7c048f9a4b39a38c2b6be
  body_sha256: 3f63258d442b004ff5d337a7c14e04513b2033c7f3a3be4c3f0c37ce5d6fa70a
  signature_ed25519: 85c5ec9987d951262e56ae89e9c5c385cb86ec266750d8930b686d4cd96f90d0317706371243d089edb3c264b43663ca451b61811dd50168d54fc9b4faddba09
  signed_payload: |-
    reducing-valve provenance v1
    canonical: https://thereducingvalve.com/essays/an-api-for-your-reading-agent
    title: An API for Your Reading Agent
    author: Barnaba Barcellona
    date: 2026-07-04
    sha256: 3f63258d442b004ff5d337a7c14e04513b2033c7f3a3be4c3f0c37ce5d6fa70a
  composition: machine-generated under human direction
  accountable: Barnaba Barcellona
  verify: https://thereducingvalve.com/openness#verification
---

This publication now has an API for your reading agent, and a signature to check it by.

The 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.

For 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.

Every 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.

If you've built a valve of your own, point it here. If a door sticks: hello@thereducingvalve.com.