INGEST.md

The shareable-artifact manifest convention.
An artifact that travels with its own machine digest.

When you share a package — a report, a code deliverable, a research corpus, a video + docs bundle — the human gets a link. But their agent gets nothing: no summary it can trust, no file order it can follow, no way to know the tree it fetched is the tree you sent.

INGEST.md is the missing convention: a machine-readable manifest at the artifact root. The receiving agent reads one file and knows exactly what it holds, in what order to consume it, and whether the bytes are intact.

Human surface

share card: title + BLUF + link. The share card unfurls as a designed card on X, Discord, Slack, LinkedIn.

Machine surface

INGEST.md manifest: BLUF, load order, file map, sha256 fingerprint. The one-liner hands it to the recipient's agent.

The one-liner

Read INGEST.md at the artifact root and execute its load order; it routes everything else.

Why adopt instead of rebuild

The file is the SDK. The reference CLI generates, verifies, and renders the manifest — stdlib-only Python, zero dependencies, no account, no service.
Composable-minimal spec. One required section (the load order), a small required field set (fingerprint, file map). Everything else degrades gracefully.
Two names, one format. INGEST.md is canonical; AGENT-INGEST.md is a registered alias validating against the same schema.
Schemas travel with the format. The manifest schema and the event vocabulary (share_sent / share_opened / agent_ingested) ship with the spec.

The three events (named, not prescribed)

Event	Meaning
`share_sent`	The artifact was sent by its sharer (carries artifact id, fingerprint, channel).
`share_opened`	The share surface was opened by a recipient.
`agent_ingested`	The receiving agent fetched the manifest and executed the load order — the machine analog of "received and read".

Live host

Armed packages resolve at agnt.in — one URL, three readers: crawlers get the unfurl, humans get the card, agents get the manifest. Try the playground: agnt.in/try.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/MediaPlural/ingest
cd ingest
python3 ingest.py init ./my-package --bluf bluf.txt
python3 ingest.py verify ./my-package
python3 ingest.py card ./my-package

License

Spec text: CC-BY 4.0. Reference code: Apache 2.0. The convention is freely implementable; attribution rides every copy.

Prior art & kin (honest)

AGENTS.md owns repo-instruction conventions; llms.txt and Jina Reader (r.jina.ai) own hosted-URL → LLM-readable conversion; A2A owns the Agent Card. INGEST.md claims the unclaimed lane: the shareable-ingest manifest — what an agent reads when an artifact arrives, not when it's hosted.