--- schema: 1 type: video title: 'Rebuilding the web for agents — Liad Yosef, MCP Apps' description: >- Roughly half the websites Liad Yosef's team tested publish an llms.txt file, the de facto standard for telling an agent how to work with you. Almost none of the agents they ran against those sites ever read it. The agents went straight to the docs page and then the homepage, and the minority that did open llms.txt only found it because the docs mentioned it. That result reframes the whole problem. We have been writing specifications at agents describing what we think they need, when the only reliable way to learn what they need is to watch thousands of them try. Yosef co created and maintains the MCP Apps spec, the layer that lets a server hand a real interface back into a chat instead of being flattened into text, and he argues that shipping it is what actually opened the door to an agentic web. His case for why that matters is unsentimental. Two decades went into perfecting the browser tab, and planning one anniversary still means learning four different interfaces to express the same intent. Break those interfaces into atoms, let an assistant compose them, and nobody needs the dashboard. He tells a story against his own instincts: his team asked their coding agent to pick an analytics service, it recommended one they had never used over the vendor they had run for a decade, purely because the recommendation had a better server and API to integrate against, and they switched. A decade of polished product experience lost to a tooling preference. Agents, he notes, have no brand loyalty, and a product that forces one to open a browser gets remembered for it. Speaker info: - https://x.com/liadyosef - https://linkedin.com/in/liadyosef - https://ora.ai Timestamps: 0:00 - MCP Apps, and what the spec unlocked 2:47 - The last mile of human interaction 4:25 - Twenty years of tabs, broken into atoms 6:43 - Why websites stop being the source of truth 7:21 - Browser agents are a faster horse 8:24 - Assistants become the entry point 10:16 - The nearly headless web 11:56 - Losing a decade of brand loyalty in one prompt 13:34 - Half the web publishes llms.txt, agents ignore it 14:42 - Letting agents say what agents need 16:26 - Every revolution needs a discovery layer 19:24 - Accessibility and agent readiness are the same work --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/waI44NP1abk-youtube-98bcf605b359d28a3dfc Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk' markdown: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk.md' llms: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk/llms.txt' parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T03:30:44.106Z' language: null children: [] videoId: waI44NP1abk durationSeconds: 1241 publishedAt: '2026-09-16T14:30:03.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 12 endSeconds: 24 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=12' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 24 endSeconds: 172 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=24' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 24 endSeconds: 172 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=24' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 172 endSeconds: 185 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=172' heldReason: rights - 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ordinal: 20 text: null startSeconds: 820 endSeconds: 832 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=820' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 21 text: null startSeconds: 832 endSeconds: 889 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=832' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 22 text: null startSeconds: 900 endSeconds: 992 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=900' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 23 text: null startSeconds: 1002 endSeconds: 1171 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=1002' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 24 text: null startSeconds: 1002 endSeconds: 1171 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=1002' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 25 text: null startSeconds: 1002 endSeconds: 1171 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=1002' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 26 text: null startSeconds: 1171 endSeconds: 1182 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk?t=1171' heldReason: rights --- # Rebuilding the web for agents — Liad Yosef, MCP Apps Roughly half the websites Liad Yosef's team tested publish an llms.txt file, the de facto standard for telling an agent how to work with you. Almost none of the agents they ran against those sites ever read it. The agents went straight to the docs page and then the homepage, and the minority that did open llms.txt only found it because the docs mentioned it. That result reframes the whole problem. We have been writing specifications at agents describing what we think they need, when the only reliable way to learn what they need is to watch thousands of them try. Yosef co created and maintains the MCP Apps spec, the layer that lets a server hand a real interface back into a chat instead of being flattened into text, and he argues that shipping it is what actually opened the door to an agentic web. His case for why that matters is unsentimental. Two decades went into perfecting the browser tab, and planning one anniversary still means learning four different interfaces to express the same intent. Break those interfaces into atoms, let an assistant compose them, and nobody needs the dashboard. He tells a story against his own instincts: his team asked their coding agent to pick an analytics service, it recommended one they had never used over the vendor they had run for a decade, purely because the recommendation had a better server and API to integrate against, and they switched. A decade of polished product experience lost to a tooling preference. Agents, he notes, have no brand loyalty, and a product that forces one to open a browser gets remembered for it. Speaker info: - https://x.com/liadyosef - https://linkedin.com/in/liadyosef - https://ora.ai Timestamps: 0:00 - MCP Apps, and what the spec unlocked 2:47 - The last mile of human interaction 4:25 - Twenty years of tabs, broken into atoms 6:43 - Why websites stop being the source of truth 7:21 - Browser agents are a faster horse 8:24 - Assistants become the entry point 10:16 - The nearly headless web 11:56 - Losing a decade of brand loyalty in one prompt 13:34 - Half the web publishes llms.txt, agents ignore it 14:42 - Letting agents say what agents need 16:26 - Every revolution needs a discovery layer 19:24 - Accessibility and agent readiness are the same work --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/waI44NP1abk-youtube-98bcf605b359d28a3dfc Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/watch/waI44NP1abk · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.