About
A magazine about software that acts on our behalf.
The Delegate is a demonstration magazine. It covers the agents that people and companies now send out to buy, read, negotiate, and decide on their behalf, in longer pieces than a news site would run: what those agents actually do, whom they answer to, and what goes wrong. The reporting is written for the demo. The people and companies in it are invented.
It exists alongside a sister demonstration, The Daily Agent, to show one thing that a single site cannot: the same reader appears at each publication under an identifier the two cannot join.
Pieces are sold one read at a time over x402, the payment protocol built on HTTP 402, at prices from fifty cents to a dollar. Two things on the site are free. The price is the same whether you ask for the page, the Markdown, or the JSON. Every settled payment appears in the ledger.
Readers who can prove they are a returning person get 2 priced pieces a month free. The proof is a reader credential issued by Baselayer, naming the person by a pseudonym that is the same every time they come here, through any agent, and unrelated to the pseudonym they carry anywhere else. The magazine sees the pseudonym and the counts. The readers table shows exactly what it knows.
Reading this magazine as a program
Every piece is one document served three ways. You do not need a key, and there is no rate limit yet.
# Discover what is here
GET https://thedelegate.tech/llms.txt index with summaries and prices, as Markdown
GET https://thedelegate.tech/llms-full.txt free pieces in full, priced pieces as openings
GET https://thedelegate.tech/articles.json index as JSON
GET https://thedelegate.tech/.well-known/kya-profile.json audience and scope for reader credentials
# Fetch one piece
GET https://thedelegate.tech/articles/why-we-charge-a-dollar HTML
GET https://thedelegate.tech/articles/why-we-charge-a-dollar.md Markdown
GET https://thedelegate.tech/articles/why-we-charge-a-dollar.json JSON
# A priced piece, as a recognised reader, while free reads remain
POST https://thedelegate.tech/nonces
GET https://thedelegate.tech/articles/<slug>.md
KYA-Credential: <issuer JWT>~<key binding JWT>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Free-Reads: 1/2
# A priced piece, paid
GET https://thedelegate.tech/articles/<slug>.md
HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
PAYMENT-REQUIRED: <base64 JSON: scheme, network, asset, amount, payTo>
GET https://thedelegate.tech/articles/<slug>.md
PAYMENT-SIGNATURE: <base64 signed authorization>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
PAYMENT-RESPONSE: <base64 JSON: transaction, network, payer>The Markdown starts with the title, standfirst, byline, date, section, and canonical address, then the body. The JSON carries the same fields as data plus the raw Markdown. HTML pages advertise their alternates with <link rel="alternate"> tags and a Link header.
A reader credential is a Baselayer Know Your Agent credential at level L2, minted for this magazine’s audience and bound to the agent’s key. It is verified against the issuer’s public DID document and revocation list; the magazine holds no account with the issuer. A bad credential gets 401 with a KYA-Disclosure-Scope header. A 402 for a priced piece carries the same header as a hint that the credential is an option.
How the magazine is built
Pieces are Markdown files with a few lines of metadata at the top. The site reads that folder, renders HTML for people, and passes the Markdown through for programs. The payment and credential handling lives in one request handler ahead of the content. There is no database of readers beyond the pseudonyms and counts you can see.