Markdown mirrors

Every human page on this site has a .md mirror. Append .md to any URL — or send Accept: text/markdown — and you get clean markdown instead of the rendered HTML.

Why bother?

Agents parse markdown far more cheaply than HTML. No site chrome, no navigation, no scripts, no CSS — just content. That means fewer tokens per page, which means less of the agent's context budget spent on structure it's going to throw away anyway.

The convention isn't standardized yet, but a rough consensus is forming around two shapes:

• Path suffix. Serve /foo (HTML) and /foo.md (markdown) side by side. Cacheable, easy to link, easy to reason about. The llms.txt spec recommends this.
• Content negotiation. Same URL, but if the request sends Accept: text/markdown, return markdown. Vercel wrote a good post on how to implement this in Next.js.

This site does both.

There are also scanners now — isitagentready.com is one — that grade your site on how discoverable and machine-readable it is. Markdown mirrors are one of the things they explicitly check for. Cheap thing to add. Worth doing.

More soon.