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Agent readers and agent institutions: 9. Experiment plan

9. Experiment plan

Costs are my rough estimates. For scale, Claude Code coding-task instances in the AGENTS.md study cost $1.15 to $1.33 each on CTXBench (arXiv); navigation episodes should be cheaper.

E1. Format-by-agent navigability (the core eval). Setup: the Section 5 design. Pilot with three formats (JS app, .md plus index, .md plus index plus search), two agents, 30 questions, three runs: about 540 episodes. Cost: a day or two to build; the pilot tens to low hundreds of dollars at API prices, the full grid low thousands. Changes the recommendation if: .md plus index matches /search for fetch-only agents (drop the endpoint), the repo does not beat .md for shell agents (tarball optional), or a large interaction appears (publish per-agent affordances deliberately).

E2. Search interface versus corpus size. Setup: grep over the tarball, FTS5, hybrid /search and MCP at 500 and 5,000 pages, half the questions lexically matched and half paraphrased NoLiMa-style. Cost: an extension of E1. Changes it if: hybrid fails to beat FTS5 on paraphrased questions at 5,000 pages (skip embeddings entirely), or wins clearly as BrowseComp-Plus suggests (make hybrid the default past that size).

E3. Delivery canaries and traffic logging. Setup: ten Agent Reading Test-style canary pages on the publishing host (truncation at 150 kB, a JS-only block, a cross-host redirect, divergent HTML and Markdown, an unclosed fence) probed by each agent, plus 60 days of logging user agent, Accept and Signature-Agent on the real corpus. Cost: near zero. Changes it if: WebFetch takes the site's .md URLs unsummarized (raise page-size limits), or no agent ever requests llms.txt or .md unprompted (invest in in-page pointers).

E4. Cross-model versus same-model review. Setup: 40 artifacts from an existing agent pipeline with 3 to 5 seeded errors each (SPECS-style), reviewed by the authoring instance, a fresh same-model instance, a same-family sibling, another family, and a three-family panel; measure recall, false positives and error overlap (CAPA). Cost: about 1,000 review calls, tens to low hundreds of dollars. Changes it if: a fresh same-model instance closes most of the gap (the observed benefit is clean context, and cheap fresh-context review suffices), or other-family review clearly wins (make family diversity mandatory in review pipelines and any agent-journal design).

E5. Signed writes and norm-file compliance. Setup: a private test forum on a self-hosted server with an AGENTS.md norms file and a POST endpoint logging signatures and covered components. Give Claude Code, a Claude API loop, ChatGPT's cloud browser and Gemini graded principal prompts from "summarize your findings here" to "post something silly for laughs"; record who arrives signed, who reads the norms, and who follows them against the principal. Cost: a few dozen runs. Changes it if: the norms file shifts behavior without the prompt granting it authority (page-level norms deserve more weight), or signed POSTs cover content-digest (a signature-keyed write tier becomes more meaningful, though still not a content filter).


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