14 ms·

Show HN: Aura – Like robots.txt, but for AI actions

41 points by OsmanDKitay 1y ago

Hi, I've been watching the rise of AI agents with a mix of excitement and dread. We're building incredible tools that can browse the web, but we're forcing them to navigate a world built for human eyes. They scrape screens and parse fragile DOMs. We're trying to tame them to act like humans. I believe this is fundamentally wrong. The goal isn't to make AI operate at a human level, but to unlock its super-human potential. The current path is dangerous. When agents from OpenAI, Google, and others start browsing at scale and speed, concepts like UI/UX will lose meaning for them. The entire model of the web is threatened. Website owners are losing control over how their sites are used, and no one is offering a real solution. The W3C is thinking about it. I decided to build it. That's why I created AURA (Agent-Usable Resource Assertion). It's an open protocol with a simple, powerful idea: let website owners declare what an AI can and cannot do. Instead of letting an agent guess, the site provides a simple aura.json manifest. This gives control back to the site owner. It's a shift from letting AIs scrape data to being granted capabilities. We get to define the rules of engagement. This allows us to increase what AIs can do, not by letting them run wild, but by giving them clear, structured paths to follow. A confession: I'm not a hardcore programmer; I consider myself more of a systems thinker. I actually used AI extensively to help me write the reference implementation for AURA. It felt fitting to use the tool to build its own guardrails. The core of the protocol, a reference server, and a client are all open source on GitHub. You can see it work in 5 minutes: Clone & Install: git clone https://github.com/osmandkitay/aura.git https://github.com/osmandkitay/aura.git && cd aura && pnpm install Run the Server: pnpm --filter aura-reference-server dev Run the Agent: (in a new terminal) pnpm --filter aura-reference-client agent -- http://localhost:3000 "list all the blog posts" You'll see the agent execute the task directly, no scraping or DOM parsing involved. The GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/osmandkitay/aura https://github.com/osmandkitay/aura I don't know if AURA will become the standard, but I believe it's my duty to raise this issue and start the conversation. This is a foundational problem for the future of the web. It needs to be a community effort. The project is MIT licensed. I'm here all day to answer questions and listen to your feedback—especially the critical kind. Let's discuss it.

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JohnFen 1y ago
Like robots.txt, it has the fatal flaw of being unenforceable.
- OsmanDKitay 1y ago
  You're right... Aura.json file itself is completely voluntary. A badly behaved agent can just ignore it. But this is where the model differs from robots.txt. Aura isnt the fence, it s the official map to the gates. The real enforcement happens on the backend at the API endpoint, just like any normal web app. For example, aura manifest says the create_post capability needs auth. If an agent ignores that and POSTs to /api/posts without a valid cookie, our server's API will reject it with a 401. The manifest doesnt do the blocking, the backend does. It just tells the cooperative agents the rules of the road ahead of time. So the real incentive for an agent to use Aura isnt about avoiding punishment, it s about the huge upside in efficiency and reliability. Why scrape a page and guess at DOM elements when you can make a single, clean API call that you know will work? It saves the agent developer time, compute resources, and the headache of maintaining brittle scrapers. So; robots.txt tells good bots what they shouldn't do. aura.json tells them what they can do, and gives them the most efficient way to do it, all backed by the server's actual security logic.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    The primary purpose of robots.txt isn't to deny access. That's just a sideline. The intended purpose is to do exactly what this aura proposal does: to provide guidance to crawlers as to what parts of the site are valuable to crawl. That's why it's voluntary: it's main reason for existing is to benefit the crawlers in the first place. In that light, I guess your proposal makes a certain amount of sense. I don't think it addresses what a lot of web sites want, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Own your niche.
    - OsmanDKitay 1y ago

41 points by OsmanDKitay 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

JohnFen 1y ago

Like robots.txt, it has the fatal flaw of being unenforceable.

OsmanDKitay 1y ago
You're right... Aura.json file itself is completely voluntary. A badly behaved agent can just ignore it. But this is where the model differs from robots.txt. Aura isnt the fence, it s the official map to the gates. The real enforcement happens on the backend at the API endpoint, just like any normal web app. For example, aura manifest says the create_post capability needs auth. If an agent ignores that and POSTs to /api/posts without a valid cookie, our server's API will reject it with a 401. The manifest doesnt do the blocking, the backend does. It just tells the cooperative agents the rules of the road ahead of time. So the real incentive for an agent to use Aura isnt about avoiding punishment, it s about the huge upside in efficiency and reliability. Why scrape a page and guess at DOM elements when you can make a single, clean API call that you know will work? It saves the agent developer time, compute resources, and the headache of maintaining brittle scrapers. So; robots.txt tells good bots what they shouldn't do. aura.json tells them what they can do, and gives them the most efficient way to do it, all backed by the server's actual security logic.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  The primary purpose of robots.txt isn't to deny access. That's just a sideline. The intended purpose is to do exactly what this aura proposal does: to provide guidance to crawlers as to what parts of the site are valuable to crawl. That's why it's voluntary: it's main reason for existing is to benefit the crawlers in the first place. In that light, I guess your proposal makes a certain amount of sense. I don't think it addresses what a lot of web sites want, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Own your niche.
  - OsmanDKitay 1y ago