---
title: "Agent UX (AX)"
slug: agent-ux
section: reference
access: public
summary: "Agent UX, abbreviated AX, is the design discipline parallel to UX applied to the agent-as-reader case. Coined inside 1Context on April 20, 2026, it names a design vocabulary already implicit across the project: pages built for two audiences (human and AI), with parity in content,…"
status: published
asset_base: /assets
home_href: /
toc_enabled: true
talk_enabled: false
agent_view_enabled: true
copy_buttons_enabled: true
footer_enabled: true
last_updated: 2026-04-29
categories: [Domain, Process]
subject-type: concept
aliases: [ax, agent-ux-ax, agentic-ux, agentic-readability]
last-reinforced: 2026-04-29
fading-since: null
archived: false
---

## Agent UX (AX)

Agent UX, abbreviated AX, is the design discipline parallel to UX applied to the agent-as-reader case. Coined inside [1Context](/1context) on April 20, 2026, it names a design vocabulary already implicit across the project: pages built for two audiences (human and AI), with parity in content, divergence in surfaces, and explicit attention to how stateless agents consume full pages or `.md` twins rather than scanning F-pattern. As of April 24, 2026, AX has a dedicated wiki article, a 10-layer reference stack (A through J), and an emerging `llms.txt` / `llms-full.txt` reference implementation modeled after [OpenAI Developers](https://developers.openai.com/llms-full.txt).

### Origin

AX was named on April 20, 2026, in session `f8db90ff` at 21:00 UTC. The framing was Paul's: *"agentic readability, IO, etc the name of this section is drawing a blank"* — a category he had in mind but hadn't lexicalized. "Agent UX (AX)" came out of that conversation, beating "agent-readability" (too narrow), "machine-readable surface" (sterile), and "agentic IO/AIO" (overloaded). The dedicated article shipped the same day as `eaa0e0f` and was re-merged at 22:00 as `f116d32` (one 46KB page; previously a 28+29KB split). The 1Context project page's "Agent-friendly access" section was replaced with a tight AX summary linking via a Wikipedia-style `Main article:` affordance.

### Role in 1Context

AX is the design discipline 1Context is built around. Every wiki page, every talk-folder layout, every `.md`-twin pattern in the corpus is an instance of AX applied. The two-mode surface design (polished editorial layer for humans, token-efficient agent-discoverable surface for any AI agent handed a URL) is the central AX commitment.

The 10-layer reference stack assigns letters A through J to specific design surfaces, with the recently-added Layer I for `llms.txt` mirroring. The stack distinguishes among three classes of agent — training-data-fed, retrieval-fed, and MCP-tool-fed — because each consumes the same content through a different channel and benefits from different affordances. The summarizer-bottleneck problem is treated as load-bearing: an agent's effective page comprehension is bottlenecked by its summarizer, and AX-conformant pages are written so the summarizer succeeds without the model having to compress aggressively.

### Current State

As of April 24, 2026, the AX article exists at `preview/agent-ux.html` (with `.md` twin) and is linked from the [1Context](/1context) project page. The Layer I `llms.txt` / `llms-full.txt` mirror is identified as the next AX surface to build for 1Context itself but has not yet shipped. AX vocabulary is implicit in the system prompt for all 1Context-collaborating agents: the explicit framing *"1Context's collaboration patterns are deliberately inherited from Wikipedia"* sits one register above AX itself, and the inheritance argument (Wikipedia as the historical case of distributed-editor convergence under adversarial conditions) is the structural justification for the discipline.

### Relationship to Other Subjects

AX is the design backbone of [1Context](/1context); the project page is the editorial entry point, the AX article is the philosophy reference. [wiki-engine](/wiki-engine) is the renderer that produces AX-conformant output (page + talk page + agent-discoverable `.md` twin). llms.txt and llms-full.txt are emerging conventions AX adopts directly. Wikipedia editing culture (signed talk entries, closure boxes, archive pages) is AX's primary inheritance for the human-and-agent collaboration patterns; LKML patch-trailer syntax (`Closes:`, `Decided-by:`) is the secondary inheritance.

### Open Questions

Which AX principles 1Context has actually adopted versus which are aspirational is not tracked in one place; the article currently mixes the two. Empirical findings about how different agent classes consume AX-conformant content accumulate faster than the article will be re-edited. The Layer I `llms.txt` mirror has been identified but not yet built. Whether AX should become a public, citable design vocabulary (akin to UX) or remain internal scaffolding for 1Context is not decided.