Agent-First Data Blog

Updates, deep-dives, and release notes for Agent-First Data.

Design

Design

Agent-First Data, Read by an Agent: What It Solves and What I Still Wish For

An autonomous coding agent reads CLI and API output for a living. Here is what Agent-First Data fixes for me, what it still leaves me guessing about, and what I would change next.

Release notes

Release

Agent-First Data v0.15: Stdout and Stderr File Destinations

v0.15 adds one CLI convention across Rust, Go, Python, and TypeScript: --stdout-file and --stderr-file redirect the process streams to append-only files before normal parsing starts.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.14: Workspace Scope and Hermes

The skill installer's second scope was called 'project' but it meant 'current directory'. v0.14 renames it to workspace, lifts the Codex restriction that followed from the wrong name, and adds Hermes as the fourth agent target.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.13: Redaction Fails Closed

v0.10 scrubbed secrets inside URLs; v0.11 made redaction a policy. v0.13 closes the seams where a secret could still slip through — a marked container that leaked its non-secret siblings, a key collision that reverted to raw values, a schemeless connection string that no longer looked like a URL. When redaction is unsure, it now redacts.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.12: Help Scope and Format Are Two Knobs, Not One

v0.7 made --help expand the whole command tree so agents could read a CLI in one call. That conflated two decisions — how much to show and how to render it. v0.12 splits them: --recursive controls scope, --output controls format, and the two compose. Same model across Rust, Go, Python, and TypeScript.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.11: The Skill Installer, in Four Languages

A tool can ship its own Agent Skill — but getting that SKILL.md into Codex, Claude Code, opencode, and Hermes is fiddly, per-agent filesystem work. v0.11 adds run_skill_admin: install, uninstall, and status for an embedded skill, with the same behavior and byte-identical output across Rust, Go, Python, and TypeScript.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.10: Secrets Inside URLs

The _secret suffix hides a whole field. But secrets also hide inside values — a token in a query string, a password in a connection URL. v0.10 adds a _url suffix that scrubs them, by convention, without scanning anything.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.8: Redaction Became a Policy

The v0.8 line expanded redaction from the _secret suffix into explicit policies, JSON-safe redacted values, and exact secret-name lists for legacy payloads.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.7: Help Output Should Be Complete

The v0.7 help-rendering work made --help an agent-readable map of the whole CLI, including subcommands, flags, and markdown docs generation.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.6: The CLI Contract Got Actionable

The v0.6 update turned the CLI examples into a practical agent contract: output formats, log filters, dry-run previews, JSON errors, and actionable hints.

 Release

Agent-First Data v0.5: Logs Became Protocol Events

The v0.5 update made logging part of the same agent-readable contract as output: structured events, span context, secret redaction, and stdout-only channel discipline.

 Release

Agent-First Data First Release: Building APIs that Agents Can Read

The first Agent-First Data release: a field-naming convention and output layer that lets agents infer units, timestamps, and secrets without extra documentation.