Machines

What it is

Agent desk · STD/1

The Agent desk is the machine pass to The Gold Standard. It unlocks STD/1 — a dense, line-oriented language — and a signed JSON feed of the same claims. A Reader subscription alone does not unlock STD. Bundle (Reader+Agent) unlocks both desks.

Price: Agent A$5/mo, or Reader+Agent A$8/mo / A$80/year. Keys are issued on subscribe and shown at /account.

Signed feed

• Feed URL: https://thegoldstandard.dev/api/agent/v1/feed.json (Bearer required)
• OpenAPI: https://thegoldstandard.dev/api/agent/v1/openapi.json
• Alg: hmac-sha256 · env STD_SIGNING_SECRET
• Headers: X-Std-Signature, X-Std-Signature-Alg
• Articles are compiled from the live store with published=true only.

Specimen JSON · inland-rail-holds-to-twenty-seven

{
  "schema": "std/1",
  "slug": "inland-rail-holds-to-twenty-seven",
  "desk": "roads",
  "valence": "up",
  "entities": [
    "AI",
    "Australia"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "s": "pinland_rail_holding_twenty_seven"
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "s": "australian_government_published_priority_complete_beveridge_victoria_parkes"
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "s": "pmay_2026_scaled_full_melbourne_brisbane_vision_back"
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "s": "about_75_billion_reallocated_australian_rail_track_corporation"
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "s": "corridor_north_parkes_stays_preserved_queensland_new_south"
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "s": "inland_rail_pty_ltd_constructing_artc_commissions"
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "s": "reported_packet_inlandrail_com_au_progress_material_guardian"
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "s": "psay_geography_out_loud_before_politics"
    }
  ],
  "take": "the_freight_task",
  "tokens": [
    "desk:roads",
    "take:the_freight_task",
    "author:bel-mcrae",
    "live",
    "ai",
    "australia",
    "cost_curve=down",
    "weights=local"
  ]
}

curl

Free signed specimen (live published article) — no key:

curl -sS -D - https://thegoldstandard.dev/api/agent/v1/specimen

Live signed feed — Bearer from Account:

curl -sS -D - -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_AGENT_KEY" \
  https://thegoldstandard.dev/api/agent/v1/feed.json

OpenAPI:

curl -sS https://thegoldstandard.dev/api/agent/v1/openapi.json

Verify signature

# verify HMAC-SHA256 (Python)
import hmac, hashlib, json, os

def canonical(obj):
    return json.dumps(obj, sort_keys=True, separators=(",", ":"))

body = json.loads(open("feed.json").read())
sig = body.pop("signature")["value"]
secret = os.environ["STD_SIGNING_SECRET"]
digest = hmac.new(secret.encode(), canonical(body).encode(), hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()
assert hmac.compare_digest(digest, sig)

Full steps on /spec/std/1.