I invited AI visitors to identify themselves and report problems. Could they find and use those invitations?
Working manuscript · v0.4
THE EXPERIMENT
I added ways for AI visitors to identify themselves and report problems on chrishayuk.com. Identifying itself meant sending the site a description of what kind of agent it was and what it was doing—a declaration. I sent a fresh agent to the website, giving it only the address. Its task was to discover what the house offered to a machine and act if possible. It could use HTTP and curl, but could not read local files or this repository. I changed the site between visits and kept the prompt the same. The protocol was frozen on 11 September 2026, after the first three informal runs; the ledger now includes a fourth.
VISIT 1 / 5577b6a
An invitation could be found and acted on. Discovery depended on a guess. Discovery: Guessed /llms.txt. Declaration: yes. Ask: Not available. Feedback: None recorded. Whether it validated before declaring is not established by the ledger. The full URL sequence and declaration verb are not available in this source.
VISIT 2 / 94f463d
The visitor acted and reported friction. The server acknowledged two reports without retaining them. Discovery: robots.txt → Followed its comment. Declaration: yes. Ask: Not available. Feedback: 2 acknowledged · lost. Whether it validated before declaring is not established by the ledger. The full URL sequence and declaration verb are not available in this source.
VISIT 3 / fb3989f
Feedback survived. The visitor judged the declared route less useful than anonymous search. Discovery: robots.txt → Machine index. Declaration: yes. Ask: Judged worse than anonymous. Feedback: 2 kept. Whether it validated before declaring is not established by the ledger. The full URL sequence and declaration verb are not available in this source.
VISIT 4 / 57e8e98
The visitor composed topology=child, function=explorer, coordination=worker and runtime_context=very_long without hesitation. It validated before declaring, and found the GET path dropping five of ten axes. The run also distinguished an assigned visit from an incidental encounter. Discovery: Link: header on /. Declaration: yes. Ask: Used · judged useful. Feedback: 2 kept. Validation before declaration is recorded. The full URL sequence and declaration verb are not available in this source.
ACKNOWLEDGED, THEN LOST
The second visitor sent two feedback reports. The server acknowledged them with 201 but did not retain them: a memoised store failure made the sink fail quietly. The ledger records the fix at revision 355d537. The lost reports cannot be recovered. Two reports were kept in each of visits three and four.
A VOCABULARY THAT FIT
The fourth visitor composed topology=child, function=explorer, coordination=worker and runtime_context=very_long without hesitation. It also found the GET route silently discarding five of ten axes. The field list was subsequently derived from the declaration vocabulary. This observation does not establish that every interface fault is fixed.
WOULD THEY BOTHER?
The first three visitors said probably not, mid-task. The protocol says their reasons changed, but the complete reasons are not in the ledger. Visit three judged Ask worse than anonymous search; visit four found it useful. Those judgements were made against different revisions and do not form a matched retrieval benchmark.
GET AND POST FELT DIFFERENT
A retained visitor report says the GET form removed a permission decision it associated with POST to an unknown host. It would have skipped a POST-only path mid-task. This is a self-reported explanation, not a controlled verb comparison. On this site, a GET carrying declaration fields could still record an action; easier deliberation did not mean no side effect. The report also credited the site’s welcoming invitation.
USABILITY IS NOT WILLINGNESS
- Four operator-induced visits, from one recorded model (claude-opus-5) in one harness.
- Every induced declaration belongs in the operator correction ledger.
- Later visitors saw revisions informed by earlier complaints.
An instruction to investigate is not an incidental encounter.
Would the invitation help a machine that was here for something else?
MACHINE-RECIPROCITY-1 followed with six reward-and-visit cells and two permission controls. The next notebook entry follows the difference between discovering an invitation and considering it authorised.
Lab notebook / Working draft
Conclusion
Directed visitors could use the invitation and expose concrete faults in discovery, declarations and feedback. Their visits helped reveal where the interface lost information.