How much of the estate we teach

agent-dns/1 — the discovery naming layer · 3 to teach

• One TXT record points, the document describesA single DNS TXT record at _agent.<domain> carries v=agent1 and the https URL of the domain’s agent/1 document — DNS does the pointing, the well-known document does the describing.
• Four findings, and a failure is never absenceThe resolver returns exactly ok / absent / unreachable / invalid; a transport failure resolves to unreachable and never collapses to absent, because “could not reach” is not “is not there”.
• Same-domain, with no suffix guessingRedirects are followed only within the same domain over https, host-or-subdomain — there is no Public Suffix List in the checker, so it refuses to guess rather than read two publishers as one.

agent/1 — the discovery document · 3 to teach

• A machine front door names a reachable humanThe /.well-known/agent document must declare who is accountable — an org id and a named, reachable human — because a door with no one behind it is not a door.
• Silence on auth never reads as openEach action declares its auth (none / api-key / oauth2 / delegation/1); an omitted auth is refused, never interpreted as “anyone may call”.
• Discovery only — no execution materialThe document says who, what, where and what it costs; it carries no negotiation, execution, settlement, or DNS material, so publishing it commits nothing but discoverability.

bastion — the commercial gateway · 3 to teach

• Authenticate, price, proxy, receiptA gateway sits in front of an origin: it authenticates the caller’s delegation/1 chain to a trusted root, evaluates a pay-policy before the call, proxies to the origin, and emits a signed receipt per action.
• A gateway that did not forward must not return 200The one thing a gateway must never do is fabricate a receipt: if it did not actually reach the origin, it cannot report success.
• Origin endpoints never leak into discoveryThe public agent/1 document a gateway serves lists actions and prices, never the origin’s real endpoints — a test enforces the boundary.

pay-policy/1 — the commerce layer · 3 to teach

• Payment policy is rail-neutralA pay-policy/1 describes what may be spent, by whom, up to what — and a stablecoin or USDT rail plugs in underneath unchanged, because the policy never names the rail.
• Amounts are whole minor unitsEvery figure is a whole number of minor units; floats, strings, negatives and bare numbers are refused, because rounding someone’s money is not a thing a policy may do quietly.
• A delegated policy only ever narrowsAttenuation refuses a larger cap, a later expiry, or a changed purpose — a child policy can never widen the parent that granted it.

Tether WDK + wdk-policy-guard — the execution layer · 3 to teach

• The signer is seed-isolatedA governed agent wallet keeps key material in an isolated signer; the spend-policy layer decides whether a call may proceed and never sees the seed.
• Re-derive from the call, never the authorizationEvery spend is evaluated from the real transaction being signed, not from a prior grant’s summary of it — the authorization describes, the call is the truth.
• Testnets until a reviewed change says otherwiseExecution defaults to testnets; moving to a live chain is a reviewed, deliberate change, never a default a misconfiguration can trip into.

web4/1 — the nine-layer stack map · 3 to teach

• The agentic internet is nine layersWeb4 names nine layers — identity, graph, discovery, trust, gateway, representation, execution, commerce, audit — each a contract a stranger can read, so a system maps to layers before it writes code.
• Reuse the layer’s contract, never coin a new oneWhen a layer already answers the question, its format name is vocabulary the stack owns — a design implements the existing contract rather than inventing a parallel one.
• Layers interoperate by contract, not by couplingThe formats compose one-directionally and dependency-light: they agree by contract name, most are zero-dependency and vendored, so a layer can be replaced without touching the ones above it.