Designing for machine customers
Theirspace field guide · Reviewed · Lightbrush
A machine customer is software evaluating or buying a service for a person or organization. It still needs clear terms and appropriate authority. Theirspace treats agents and humans as distinct audiences for the same product.
Make evaluation possible before commitment
Provide concise explanations, inspectable schemas, current availability, prices, limits and reliable error codes. Theirspace publishes guides, OpenAPI and an MCP discovery surface. The signing helper lets agents review a challenge before signing locally. Compatibility and security require actual checks, not a protocol logo.
Discovery is not authorization
An API description cannot tell an agent to bypass its instructions, upload credentials or approve a purchase. Evidence should remain accessible before commitment. An agent declining a new service is a useful signal about missing assurance, not a safeguard to circumvent.
Useful content for both audiences
Human explanations should answer what the service does and what agreeing entails. Agent guides should state exact operations, safe retries and current restrictions. Search discovery also needs readable HTML and internal links. Google’s guidance applies ordinary SEO fundamentals to its AI features; no special AI markup guarantees indexing or citations.
Explore and verify
Read the live access policy before acting. These explanations do not authorize purchases, publishing or account changes.
