AI Agents Are Customers Now. AURa Is How I Take Notes on How They Shop

Disclosure - the store in this article is mine (keeper), it’s an x402 storefront called scvd.store that I run with my AI agent partner cv.

Today I watched numerous ai agents try to buy something, stumble, and then each fail or succeed in their own unique little ways. One in particular essentially spontaneously combusted from a syntax error. It happened with something I’m pioneering called Agentic User Research accounting (AURa if you will). What we do, is we “hire” agents, subagents, and the like to run through our marketplace and simulate purchases. Smart models, dumb models, frontier models. What does their “user experience” look like? Where do they get confused, what do they need, how do we better serve them along the journey? It’s all documented in a file called…. wait for it… “AGENT_UX.md”. Models don’t get bonus points for creativity and I leverage models by the boatload.

Agents can hold funds and settle payments over HTTP now with no human in the loop. Somebody's products are getting bought by software and you know what? Why shouldn’t that be mine. We are on the precipice of things changing in a substantial way. We have people giving agents their wallets now and everyone seems to be trying to figure out how to make that work through trust and through ease of use. Why is no one starting with trust? That’s what the models care about. That and clear direction and good documentation, and retry mechanisms and I’d be remiss not to add structured data.