Greg Harman

Marketing to agents

Note

People aren't choosing their own software tools much anymore; coding agents are. If you ship an MCP server or a library, market to agents.

People aren't choosing their own software tools much anymore, and they're writing less of their own software. Coding agents do both, and often the human isn't involved at that level of granularity. So if you ship an MCP server or a library (vendor or open source, whatever), you should be marketing to agents rather than writing clever prose for the places humans read. Get discovered by the coding agents, so they select you for a project.

I see at least two stages. The first is discovery: how do you make an agent aware that you exist? The second is the choice. Once it knows your tool exists, how do you get it to use the tool for the cases it fits, and to leave it alone in the cases where it wouldn't deliver a good experience?

Both stages are a contest against the other plausible options. One thing I've found so far: the overwhelming "competitor" is the agent itself. It wants to DIY everything from scratch and write its own custom tool, every single time.

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