Ryan Seslow Museum of Art & Design Brooklyn, New York City

Archive to Agent

Two things happen on this page. First you watch a machine that has never heard of me find my archive, read what is in it, choose a work, and ask what it costs. Then you take the files that make your own archive answer the same way.

Every request in the first half is made live from your browser to ryanseslow.com while you watch. Nothing is staged, nothing is recorded, and no result is stored. The prices, the wallet and the countdown are the same ones a real buying agent would receive right now.

I am not showing you my site because it is interesting. I am showing you my site because it is the only one I had to work on, and because the five files that made it answer are small enough to hand you at the bottom of this page.

Nothing is bought and nothing is charged. The agent stops at the moment the price comes back, which is an HTTP response called 402 Payment Required. No wallet is connected, no transaction is signed, and no money moves. You are watching the part of the economy that normally happens with nobody in the room.

Nothing is asked of my archive until you press that. If you are only reading, this page has not touched it at all.

Send it after a different one

This is exactly what the agent read. No pictures, no page, no layout, just the fields. Pick another and it will ask that price instead. It already holds the catalog, so only the price is requested again.

Now make your own archive answer

There is no secret in the run above. A machine found me because five small files told it where to look, and it got a price because one of them was a script instead of a document. Fill this in and take those same five files, written for your site. They are built here in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and I never see what you type.

However you sign your work.

No https:// needed, I will add it.

An address on Base that can hold USDC.

A starting number. You will edit it later anyway.

llms.txtSits at your web root and says, in plain language, who you are and what a machine may do here.
.well-known/ai-plugin.jsonThe conventional place an API announces itself. It points at the spec below.
.well-known/openapi.jsonThe spec. It tells an agent exactly which calls exist and what comes back.
catalog.jsonYour works as structured data, in the same schema.org shape a search engine already understands.
x402-quote.phpThe one that is not a document. It answers 402 Payment Required with a real price, in USDC, addressed to you.
README.txtWhere each file goes, and what it does not do yet.

What this gives you, and what it does not. These files make you findable, readable and quotable by a machine. That is the hard part and almost nobody has done it. They do not settle a payment. The quote script hands an agent a real price and a real address, and then stops exactly where the run above stopped. Taking the money and releasing the work is yours to build, and you should build that part slowly.