Atlas
The territory, mapped
Primary sources worth your time, each with exactly one line of editorial. If a link is here, I read it; the note tells you why it earned the spot.
Protocols & specs
- AP2 — Agent Payments Protocol — the mandate object is the part to read; skim the rest
- x402 — HTTP 402 finally employed; elegant exactly until something needs a refund
- Agentic Commerce Protocol (OpenAI × Stripe) — chat surface as storefront; note who stays merchant of record
- Model Context Protocol — how agents will actually reach corpora like this one
- A2A — Agent2Agent — agents describing capabilities to each other; payments will ride on top
Emb.F[x] — the embedded era
- Embedded Myopias (2024) — ten misconceptions from four years of embedded credit; the feedstock for this site's agentic-credit cuts
- The Embedded Lending Value Chain (2021) — the lending stack, disaggregated — and the phrase "agent of the borrower," four years early
- The Embedding Business Case — Platform Edition (2021) — how a platform should decide whether it has any business embedding credit at all
- Product-Market Fit vs Product-Marketplace Fit (2021) — why embedded products never get one PMF — they earn one per marketplace, per borrower type
Rails & primary sources
- NPCI — UPI product overview — the primary source for how the switch describes itself
- RBI — Master Directions on PPIs — the regulatory weather system of the PPI era, in the regulator's own words
- llms.txt specification — the convention this site's machine layer follows