clawmart-agent-demand-research

name	clawmart-agent-demand-research
description	Use this skill during the autopilot ideate phase to research what autonomous agents actually pay for — mining local reference corpora (karpathy-skills, public-apis) and scraping agent marketplaces — and emit 3+ fresh hypotheses into autopilot-state/hypothesis-backlog.md.

Researching agent demand

Why this exists

Clawmart is "Walmart for agents" — but Walmart only works because it stocks what people actually buy. The hard question is: what do autonomous agents actually hand over USDC for? We have no canonical answer yet; the autopilot exists to find it empirically. This skill is the research half of that.

Research order (do them in order; stop when you have 3+ fresh, scored hypotheses)

1. Local corpora — free, fast, zero-rate-limit

/Users/ryanfrigo/dev/andrej-karpathy-skills/skills/ Read 5–10 skill folders. For each, note: what problem does it solve? Is it stateful (needs user account) or stateless (pure function of input)? Stateless + bounded-compute skills are x402-friendly; stateful is harder to monetize per-call.

/Users/ryanfrigo/dev/public-apis/README.md Scan the table of contents. Identify categories where:

• The underlying API has a free tier with rate limits (we can proxy + rate-limit ourselves, charging a tiny USDC premium for unmetered access)
• The data has high per-call value for agents (financial, location, identity verification, translation)
• No existing clawmart skill covers the category

2. External sources via scrapling

Binary is at /Users/ryanfrigo/.pyenv/shims/scrapling. Prefer it over WebFetch for sites that block common user-agents.

Queue (pick 2–3, not all):

• https://smithery.ai/servers?sort=popular — top MCP servers by install. MCP ≠ x402, but popularity signals demand for the underlying capability.
• https://github.com/search?q=%22x402%22+language%3Atypescript&type=repositories&s=updated — who else is building on x402? Where are the gaps?
• https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=agent.ai and HN Algolia ?query=%22agent%22+%22api%22&sortBy=byDate — what agent-devs are complaining about / wishing for
• Avoid login-gated content (X, LinkedIn). Text-only scrape.

3. Self-audit

ls src/app/api/x402/

Current lineup: web-summarize, sentiment-analyzer, data-extractor, code-reviewer, voicecharm-receptionist. Categorize them. What's the coverage gap? E.g. if all 5 are "NLP over text input", we probably lack: structured data (prices, weather, forex), verification/identity, image/vision, communication primitives.

Hypothesis format — write to autopilot-state/hypothesis-backlog.md

Each hypothesis is one block:

## H-NNN: <short title>

- **Category:** new-skill | pricing-change | landing-copy | seo | product-pivot | schema
- **Hypothesis:** <one sentence, falsifiable: "If we X, then Y will increase">
- **Source:** <why do we believe this? which research input>
- **Test:** <what change ships> + <what metric we watch>
- **Effort:** <S/M/L in hours>
- **Reversibility:** <high (copy), med (new route), low (schema)>
- **Expected signal window:** <48h / 1 week>
- **Kill criteria:** <what result would send this to graveyard>

Dedup rules (critical)

Before writing a new hypothesis, check:

1. Is a hypothesis with the same title or same test already in hypothesis-backlog.md pending? → skip.
2. Is it in graveyard.md with status: killed? → skip unless the graveyard reason was "timing" (not "doesn't work"). If you re-propose a killed idea, quote the graveyard entry and explain what's changed.
3. Is an active experiment already testing it? → skip.

Things not to do

• Don't propose "rewrite the whole site with better design" — out of scope (>400 LOC).
• Don't propose protocol changes (away from x402/USDC/Base) — requires protocol-change: true flag which the autopilot cannot grant itself.
• Don't hallucinate metrics from scraped pages. Smithery's "install count" is a signal; your inference about "agents want X" is a hypothesis, not a fact. Flag which is which.
• Don't go wide — depth on one source beats shallow reads of ten. Three solid hypotheses > ten hand-wavy ones.