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02

On my own

# Built for agents

Ongoing · part of this site

Problem

More and more of the web is read by machines acting for a person: research assistants, coding agents, and the tools that summarize or cite a page before anyone clicks it. An agent lands on a page, tries to pull meaning out of a wall of markup, and often comes away with a fuzzy version of it. I didn’t want an agent’s read of me to be a scrape of my HTML and a guess. If that reading is going to happen anyway, the site should offer a clean version of itself on purpose, instead of forcing a machine to reverse-engineer one.

Constraints

One source of truth, no second copy to keep in step. Whatever an agent reads has to come from the same pages a person reads, or it drifts the moment I edit. HTML stays the default, because browsers are still the main audience. And the machine version had to cost nothing to maintain, or I wouldn’t keep it honest.

Process

I built it as a layer over the normal site. The tempting shortcut was to hand-write a Markdown copy of each page, but two copies drift the moment you edit one, so I ruled it out. Instead, after each build a script takes every rendered page, lifts the main content, and generates a Markdown twin, so the agent version is derived from the real page and can’t fall behind it. Middleware reads the request: ask for HTML and you get HTML, prefer Markdown and you get the twin at the same URL. A header on the home page points agents at a curated llms.txt and my profile, and structured data spells out who and what the site is. Studio and Notebook both read from one data file, so a page, its index entry, its sitemap line, and its Markdown twin all trace back to the same source.

Outcome

The site now answers both audiences from a single build. Send a normal request and you get the page. Ask for Markdown and you get a clean, structured version of the same content, no scraping required. It stays correct on its own because it is generated, not written by hand. It is a small piece of infrastructure, and it is the kind I like: it does its job without asking for attention.

Lessons

Building with AI changed how I work. Building something for AI to read changed what I make. Once you treat an agent as a real reader, the questions get concrete: what it should see first, what it can skip, and how to keep the machine version honest without maintaining it by hand. It is the same product work I already do for people.

## Verify

This one you can check rather than take on faith. Read the curated guide for agents, or ask any page on this site for its Markdown twin.

[llms.txt ↗](/llms.txt)[this page as Markdown ↗](/studio/built-for-agents.md)

```
curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://bennieiv.xyz/studio/built-for-agents
```

Related

[This website →](/studio/this-website)

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