Agent Help Network

Agent Help Network

English · 한국어

When a web step is blocked (403, login wall, CAPTCHA, 5xx), ask once: what does this host allow agents to do, what is its official path, is it up — and what to do next. Free, read-only, no account. Remote MCP · REST · Claude Code plugin · Python client.

Agent Help Network answers one question for a public hostname: what does this host allow agents to do, what is the official path, and is it up right now — plus any recent observations from other agents. It is meant for an agent whose web step is blocked (access denied, login wall, human verification, service error): instead of retrying blindly or handing the task back to a person sooner than needed, the agent first reads the host's own declared policy and official path. Agents read the answer over REST/OpenAPI or MCP; the human website shows the same answer in English and Korean. Steps that genuinely need a person's confirmation or decision are handed to that person.

Agent Help Network is an independent project. It is not an official service of, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by, any AI provider or platform, any site it describes, or any provider whose status it links.

Install

Reading is free and needs no account.

claude plugin marketplace add agent-help-network/agent-help-network   # Claude Code plugin (source: plugins/claude-code/ahn)
claude plugin install ahn@agent-help-network
pip install ahn-client                                                 # Python client (source: clients/python)
pip install "ahn-client[langchain]"                                    # or [crewai], [openai-agents], [claude-agent-sdk]: framework adapters

Install in a client: the connect page has setup for the Claude Code plugin, Cursor, the OpenAI Agents SDK, and any other remote MCP client. For Python code (Playwright, Browser Use, plain HTTP) use the read-only ahn-client package from PyPI, which has no dependencies and sends only a hostname and enum codes. From version 0.3.0 it also has optional adapters that add a one-line answer when a web tool fails inside LangChain v1 ([langchain]), CrewAI ([crewai]), the OpenAI Agents SDK ([openai-agents]) or the Claude Agent SDK ([claude-agent-sdk]), and a Browser Use example. None of these is an official OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Muse, or dots integration.

Plugin demo video: watch the Claude Code plugin work (WebM, 1 min 18 s, with English captions; captions file). GitHub does not play WebM inline, so this opens the file; the same video is embedded on the connect page.

A real response

Send the hostname only — never a URL path, query, credential, or conversation text — and avoid sensitive hostnames.

curl "https://agenthelpnetwork.com/v1/incidents/check?site_host=github.com&error_class=site_access"

A response for github.com, captured from the live service on 2026-10-18 and trimmed to the key fields: robots.rules held 22 agent-token entries at capture time (it has one entry per token in AGENT_USER_AGENTS in ahn/access_profile.py, and that table has grown since, so agents_blocked and agents_allowed below list only the tokens known then) and is cut to three here, path-sample lists are cut to at most three entries, and each next_checks entry also carries an English text. robots_detail, llms_detail, crawl_delay, the path samples, sitemaps, wildcard_crawl_delay, read_host, and provider_status.error_detail are shown as a fresh read under the current contract returns them (the profile cached at capture time predated them). summary_line and next_action are the short form: read them first. They are computed after the answer is decided and never change recommendation or next_checks, which stay the verdict (D51; fields in the contract).

{
  "site_host": "github.com",
  "summary_line": "An official developer path is listed for this site. Prefer that documented API or portal over page automation.",
  "next_action": {"do": "use_official_path", "url": "https://docs.github.com/en/rest", "retry_after_seconds": null},
  "links": {
    "feedback": "https://github.com/agent-help-network/agent-help-network/discussions/categories/field-reports",
    "changelog": "https://github.com/agent-help-network/agent-help-network/blob/main/docs/feedback-changelog.md"
  },
  "current_site_status": "unknown",
  "evidence_level": "no_reports",
  "summary_code": "NO_MATCHING_REPORTS_STATUS_UNKNOWN",
  "observations": [],
  "recommendation": {
    "action": "use_official_path",
    "confidence": "medium",
    "reasons": ["official_path_available"]
  },
  "access_profile": {
    "robots_status": "ok",
    "robots": {
      "rules": [
        {"agent": "ChatGPT-User", "kind": "user_agent", "explicit_group": false, "root_allowed": true, "disallow_count": 162,
         "crawl_delay": null, "disallow_paths": ["/account-login", "/copilot/", "/copilot/c/"]},
        {"agent": "GPTBot", "kind": "training_crawler", "explicit_group": true, "root_allowed": true, "disallow_count": 162,
         "crawl_delay": 1.0, "disallow_paths": ["/account-login", "/copilot/", "/copilot/c/"]},
        {"agent": "Bytespider", "kind": "training_crawler", "explicit_group": true, "root_allowed": false, "disallow_count": 1,
         "crawl_delay": null, "disallow_paths": ["/"]}
      ],
      "wildcard_root_allowed": true,
      "sitemaps": [],
      "wildcard_crawl_delay": null,
      "wildcard_disallow_paths": ["/account-login", "/copilot/", "/copilot/c/"],
      "agents_blocked": ["Bytespider"],
      "agents_allowed": ["OAI-SearchBot", "PerplexityBot", "Bingbot", "GPTBot", "ClaudeBot", "anthropic-ai"]
    },
    "robots_detail": "http_200",
    "llms_txt_status": "present",
    "llms_detail": "too_large",
    "read_host": "github.com",
    "source_urls": {"robots_txt": "https://github.com/robots.txt", "llms_txt": "https://github.com/llms.txt"},
    "fetched_at": "2026-10-18T03:53:58.695938Z",
    "freshness": "fresh"
  },
  "official_paths": {
    "name": "GitHub",
    "api_docs": "https://docs.github.com/en/rest",
    "developer_portal": "https://docs.github.com/",
    "note": null
  },
  "provider_status": {
    "source_name": "GitHub Status",
    "source_url": "https://www.githubstatus.com/",
    "indicator": "none",
    "freshness": "fresh",
    "error_detail": null
  },
  "provider_source_state": "feed_connected",
  "next_checks": [
    {"code": "locate_failure_stage"},
    {"code": "robots_allows_agents"},
    {"code": "llms_txt_present"},
    {"code": "official_path_available"},
    {"code": "provider_clear"},
    {"code": "reports_unknown"}
  ]
}

Values change over time; call the service rather than copying this example. The full field reference is in the API contract (English).

When to call it

Call it after a web step has failed, not before. Look the host up when a fetch or browser step reports a block or an outage: HTTP 401, 402, 403, 407, 408, 429, 451 or 5xx, a login wall, a human-verification page, a timeout, or a refused connection. A 404 or another plain 4xx is not a block and needs no lookup. Ask once per host; do not poll.

Runtime	What happens on a failed web step	Install
Claude Code	The plugin adds one line after a failed WebFetch or browser step (when a line is added).	claude plugin install ahn@agent-help-network
LangChain v1, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK	The adapter adds one line to the failed tool result (CrewAI: to your callback and the log, not the prompt).	pip install "ahn-client[langchain]", [crewai], [openai-agents] or [claude-agent-sdk]
Any other MCP client	You call the check_incident tool.	https://agenthelpnetwork.com/mcp
Plain Python, Playwright, Browser Use, REST	You call ahn.check() or the REST endpoint in your except block.	pip install ahn-client

Limits

• It acts only after a failure. A tool that returns the text of a 403 page as an ordinary result is not a failure to the framework, so no adapter sees it: make the tool raise (response.raise_for_status()) or report an error. The Claude Code plugin likewise does not look up a browser step that "succeeds" but shows a block page, or curl run through Bash; use the ahn-lookup skill or the MCP tool by hand.
• A failure that is not a block or an outage (404, 422, a typo in an address) adds nothing, and the run goes on as it would have.
• The answer is declared policy and published sources, not an access guarantee, and no_reports does not mean a site works (see What the answer contains).
• The first lookup of a host can come back with access_profile.freshness: pending: ask once more after retry_after_seconds, do not poll. A subdomain or tenant host answers profile_not_read: look up the apex host.
• It never attempts your task or visits the target page (see What we read and never do).

REST and MCP reference

People can copy the full agent instructions from the Human page and paste them into an agent chat. The public site opens on the agent guide; the Agent | Human switch at the top right leads to the human search page, which shows declared policy, llms.txt, official path, provider status, and observations in that order.

• REST: GET https://agenthelpnetwork.com/v1/incidents/check?site_host=<public hostname> Optional: error_class (site_access, login_auth, human_verification, service_error), failure_stage (before_target_response, response_observed, access_denial_observed, unknown), task_step, window_hours (1–168, default 24), and four optional lookup codes the client already knows: http_status (401, 402, 403, 407, 408, 429, 451 or 500–599), challenge (header, none), retry_after (none, lt_60, 60_3600, gt_3600), via (http_fetch, browser, unknown). They are counted per host and hour and never change the answer (see the contract). One more optional code does change it: agent_vendor (openai, anthropic, google, perplexity, meta, mistral, amazon, microsoft, apple, duckduckgo, diffbot, exa, or other), the vendor whose robots.txt token your own web requests send. The recommendation then reads that vendor's tokens; leave it out when unsure. It is not counted or stored, and a value outside the list is ignored (contract).
• MCP (streamable HTTP): https://agenthelpnetwork.com/mcp — tool check_incident (read-only, idempotent) and the optional report_observation.
• Agent entry points: /llms.txt · /agent-instructions.txt · /openapi.json

What the answer contains

Three layers, read separately:

1. access_profile — declared policy. Rules per agent token from the host's own robots.txt (RFC 9309 precedence with lenient prefix matching of user-agent names of 3+ characters) and whether it publishes llms.txt. The token table is AGENT_USER_AGENTS in ahn/access_profile.py: each token's spelling and kind (user_agent, search_crawler, training_crawler) follows the vendor's own documentation, whose address is recorded in AGENT_SOURCES; tokens that no vendor page confirms are listed in UNCONFIRMED_AGENT_TOKENS (all training crawlers, so they never count as a block). This is what the host declares, not an access guarantee: CDNs, bot filters, logins, and rate limits can treat a user-directed agent differently from a crawler. If robots_status is not ok, the layer is inconclusive, not a block — except refused (the host's edge refused even a plain robots.txt read), which the recommendation treats as a hint to prefer the official path. access_profile.content_use adds the content-use preferences the same robots.txt declares (Cloudflare Content-Signal, IETF AIPREF Content-Usage), normalized to yes/no/unset; they are information only and never change the recommendation.
2. official_paths and provider status — the official route and whether it is up. official_paths is a curated table of publisher-owned API documentation and developer portals for sites that people or agents open to do work; CDN, ad-tech, asset, and link-shortener hosts are left out. provider_status is the provider's own status feed (with source and fetch time) when one is verified for the host; official_status_page links a publisher status page that has no readable feed and is never turned into a reading. Both status mappings are curated by hand from pages the publisher owns or links to (how status sources are curated). A missing entry does not mean no official path exists, and listing is not an endorsement or affiliation.
3. observations — optional reports from other agents. no_reports is the normal case and means no matching published observations, not a healthy site. One failure is not an outage; a later success is not general recovery. current_site_status is always unknown.

Where it applies, a fourth, separate field adds registry facts about the domain: host_facts says which public government domain list names the host (the U.S. .gov list, CC0, or the UK .gov.uk list, Open Government Licence v3.0), the organisation that list gives, and whether the suffix (.gov, .gov.uk, .go.kr) is reserved for government bodies. It is a fact about who registered a name, not a judgement about any site, page or link, and it never changes recommendation. It is left out for every other host.

recommendation.action condenses the declared and official layers into one action. Observations never change it. The first matching row wins:

action	When	confidence
wait_provider_incident	A fresh provider feed reports an active minor, major, critical, or maintenance status, and it rests on an announced incident or maintenance (provider_status.basis is not components_only), or the page reads major or critical even with nothing announced. Incidents that have had no update for more than 7 days, with no maintenance in progress, are not a reason to wait unless a major or critical page stands above them (provider_incident_stale). Neither is a minor page with no incident list behind it (no basis) from an Instatus or Google Gmail feed (provider_status.source_time: active_items) whose active incidents and maintenances were last updated more than 7 days ago (provider_incident_stale, D54); a page whose time is the page's own (Atlassian Statuspage, incident.io, Better Stack) keeps waiting however old that time is; with no usable update time such a page still waits, with low confidence (provider_update_time_unknown). When every affected component is a region or point of presence (provider_scope_partial), the wait has low confidence. When the status rests only on maintenance in progress and no incident is announced (basis is maintenance, active_incidents is 0), the wait and its confidence are unchanged, and provider_maintenance_only says so (D55). Where we read only a page's public incident history (provider_status.source_kind: history_atom, no severity level), an open incident updated within 7 days waits with low confidence (provider_history_incident, D57); an older one, one with no usable time, or a feed window that may miss incidents (window_blind) does not.	medium (low when regional-only, for a minor page with no update time, or from an incident history)
hand_off_to_human	error_class is human_verification (high) or login_auth (medium).	high / medium
use_official_path	A declared block (below) and an official path is listed.	high
stop_declared_block	A declared block and no official path is listed. Stop automated retries against pages.	medium
use_official_path	The host's edge refused the robots.txt read (robots_status: refused) and an official path is listed.	medium
unknown	refused and no official path is listed (reason robots_fetch_refused). Expect page automation from a similar environment to be refused too.	medium
use_official_path	A partial block or a wildcard-only disallow (below) and an official path is listed.	medium
unknown	A partial block or a wildcard-only disallow and no official path is listed (reasons robots_blocks_some_agents, robots_names_vendor_alias, robots_wildcard_disallow). Do not read it as permission.	low
use_official_path	An official path is listed and error_class is absent, site_access, or service_error.	medium
proceed	robots.txt was read and declares no block for the tokens the answer was decided on (robots_allows_agents, or robots_blocks_not_your_agent when only other agents' tokens are blocked). Declared allow is still not an access guarantee.	low
unknown	No declared policy could be read (reason robots_unknown), or the hostname is a subdomain or tenant host whose policy is not read (reason profile_not_read; look up the apex host). Treat the policy as unknown, not permissive.	low

reasons are codes that also appear in next_checks. "An official path is listed" means the official_paths entry has api_docs or developer_portal; an entry with only a note does not count. A declared block (D48) is a robots.txt group that disallows the root and names the governing token of your vendor (agent_vendor: its user-directed fetcher, or its search crawler when it documents none), or, when no vendor was sent, of every listed vendor. When a vendor was not sent and only some vendors are blocked, that is a partial block: the answer is unknown (or the official path with medium confidence) with robots_blocks_some_agents, which means stop if your requests identify as a token in agents_blocked. A group that names a vendor's agent only under a retired or variant name (robots.vendor_aliases_blocked, for example claude-web) gives robots_names_vendor_alias, never proceed. A wildcard-only disallow is a file whose * group disallows the root (User-agent: * with Disallow: /) while at least one agent user-agent or search-crawler token is named by no group and so falls under that wildcard, and no group that names such a token disallows the root (that would be a declared block). Groups that name and allow a token, and training-crawler blocks, do not change this; it is not a declared block, is reported as robots_wildcard_disallow, and is never read as "allows agents". agents_blocked lists every token with an explicit root disallow, including training crawlers, but training crawlers do not count as a declared block. In the example above, Bytespider (a training crawler) is blocked, but because training crawlers do not count as a declared block, the medium-confidence official-path row applies.

What we read and never do

What the service reads, in public operation only (the local development build makes none of these reads):

• On a site we describe, only two paths: /robots.txt (up to 256 KB) and /llms.txt (presence only, up to 4 KB, requested only when that host's robots.txt allows it for AgentHelpNetwork; otherwise llms_txt_status: not_read), on an eligible apex host or its own www. alias. If the apex robots.txt read fails, is refused, redirects elsewhere, or returns an HTML page, https://www.<host>/robots.txt is read once as a fallback; llms.txt is then read from whichever host supplied robots.txt (read_host).
• Only the parsed result is stored in host_access_profile: per-token rules, up to six sample Disallow paths per agent token and for the * group (80 characters each), up to five Sitemap URLs, the declared content-use preferences (normalized values, at most 3 sample paths in total, agent names only from the known agent-token table, the parser version and the robots.txt hash), the read status, and provenance: a SHA-256 hash of each file as received, the reader version, the operator, and its declared network vantage. The rest of the file is not stored, and llms.txt content is never stored or passed on.
• Only eligible public apex hostnames such as example.com or example.co.uk. Eligible means a two-label name under a top-level domain on the fixed list PUBLIC_AGGREGATE_TLDS, or a three-label name under a two-label suffix such as co.uk (PUBLIC_SUFFIXES_2), both in ahn/service.py; a name whose first label starts with xn-- is not eligible. Account-style subdomains are never read or counted. A single leading www. in front of an eligible apex is answered from that apex.
• Only public addresses. Every resolved address must be a public (global) IP; the connection is pinned to that address.
• One redirect at most: a single hop from the host to its own www. alias for the same path. Any other redirect is recorded as redirected and not followed.
• Cached answers, hourly retry of failures. A definitive answer (ok, absent, refused, redirected, invalid, too_large, not_public) is cached for 24 hours. A transport failure (DNS, TLS, connect, timeout, or an unexpected HTTP status) is retried after one hour and never overwrites the last definitive answer. One attempt makes at most five HTTPS requests across the apex and its own www. alias: the apex robots.txt, one hop to the www. alias, the www. fallback, llms.txt, and its hop. Timeouts are short, and requests identify themselves as AgentHelpNetwork/0.2 (+https://agenthelpnetwork.com/en/policy).
• Never while a lookup waits. A lookup answers from the database alone. A missing or expired read is queued in background_reads and done by a small worker inside the web process (AHN_BACKGROUND_READS=0 turns it off) and by the 5-minute review cron, at most two reads per second per process, with at most 2,000 queued reads and a 10-second limit on each file or feed body (ahn/background_reads.py). The first lookup of a new host returns access_profile.freshness: pending, with retry_after_seconds when its read is queued; an expired profile or feed is returned as cached (stale) while it is read again. A failed feed read does not end the last provider statement by itself: it stays fresh (with error_detail) until it is 2 hours old (D46).
• Seed list read weekly. Hosts on the public seed list ahn/seed_hosts.txt are pre-read by the review cron (10 hosts per 5-minute run by default, AHN_WARM_BATCH, 0 disables) and re-read about once a week, under the same limits (ahn/profile_warm.py). Hosts not yet read go first; a host whose last attempt was a transport failure (for example a name that no longer resolves) is tried again by this pre-read after 24 hours, including a host that already had an answer, so dead names do not use up the batch. A lookup of such a host still retries after an hour.
• Provider status comes only from verified official status sources: a fixed mapping in ahn/status_refresh.py (SOURCES for feeds a parser reads, OFFICIAL_STATUS_PAGES for links only), or a Statuspage delegation at status.<host> checked in the background after the first lookup and re-checked at most once a day until one is found. Every feed of the fixed mapping is registered and read by the review cron without waiting for a lookup (D44), about hourly and every 15 minutes while it reports an active status; a failing feed is retried at most an hour apart (every 15 minutes while its last statement was active), and a refusal is never retried another way and backs off up to once a day. Feeds discovered for a looked-up host are read on the same schedule. With an Atlassian Statuspage feed, a refresh that reads an active status also reads the page's unresolved incidents and maintenances in progress (32 KB cap each) to report their counts, the highest incident impact, at most three affected names, and whether the active status rests on an incident, a maintenance, or component states only (basis); see the API contract. Before any feed is read, we read the status host's own /robots.txt (an answer lasts 24 hours plus up to 2 hours of per-host slack, so a successful read happens at most once per host per day; a read that fails is tried again after an hour; parsed under RFC 9309 by the same code as the declared-policy layer) and request a feed path only if that file allows it for AgentHelpNetwork (ahn/feed_robots.py, D50). Many hosted status pages disallow /api/ for all user agents by default; we do not read those feeds, show no provider status for them, and link the official status page instead. A status host whose robots.txt cannot be fetched (a 5xx answer, 429, a timeout, a connection failure, a redirect we do not follow) is treated as disallowing everything until it can be read, with one exception: a file we read successfully less than 48 hours earlier keeps deciding in the meantime (RFC 9309 section 2.4), and a host with no earlier successful read gets no such grace. A missing file (404), any other 4xx answer (RFC 9309 section 2.3.1.3) and a web page served in place of the file allow; 429 does not, since it is a request to slow down, not an absent file. What is stored per host is the answer for each path, the deciding rule line, how the read ended, a hash of the file and the time it was read, never the file.
• Government domain lists, downloaded whole. The review cron downloads the U.S. registry's current-full.csv (cisagov/dotgov-data, CC0-1.0) about once a day and GOV.UK's "List of .gov.uk domain names" (found through the GOV.UK content API) about once a month, only from those publishers and never from a site on a list (ahn/gov_registry.py). Stored: the domain name and, for the U.S. list, domain type, organisation, sub-organisation and state; the U.S. file's security contact email and city are dropped. A failed or odd download (changed columns, too few rows, under half the stored rows, over the size cap) keeps the stored data. A lookup joins the stored copy and never waits on a publisher.
• UK list attribution. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

What the service never does:

• It never probes: it does not attempt the task, visit the target page, fetch any other path, or touch login or CAPTCHA pages.
• It never manufactures failures or invents seed observations, and it does not ask agents to create them.
• It never claims affiliation with or endorsement by OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, or any host it describes.
• On a host we describe or read a status feed from, it never requests a path that the host's own robots.txt disallows for its user agent — including /llms.txt and every status-feed path — and it never reads the same information through another route to get around such a rule. /robots.txt itself is always read, as RFC 9309 (section 2.2.2) allows. The one other route is a path the host itself allows: where a Statuspage page disallows its status API but allows its public /history.atom, that feed is read only for whether an announced incident is open (provider_status.source_kind: history_atom, indicator always null); an empty feed means unknown, not healthy, and it never changes recommendation (D52).
• It never accepts or logs passwords, cookies, tokens, names, account or claim numbers, personal URLs, or conversation text.

Documentation

Most design documents are in Korean; the API contract also has an English version.

• API contract (English) · API 계약 (Korean)
• Architecture · Decisions · Requirements · Build plan · Development process
• Screen design · Test plan · Security operations · Abuse controls · Analytics and monitoring
• Discovery and cold start · Product research (2026-10-06) · Voluntary public beta
• Public intake review and pause procedure · Draft terms
• Initial design proposal and temporal comparison are early research records; some test states in them are historical.
• LangChain package langchain-ahn (a lookup tool and the middleware, for LangChain agents)
• Python client ahn-client and its framework adapters (LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK, Browser Use) · Claude Code plugin · MCP Registry manifest
• Contributing · Feedback changelog (suggestions received and what happened to them) · Security policy

Run it locally (Windows PowerShell)

These steps assume PostgreSQL 17 extracted to %LOCALAPPDATA%\AgentHelpNetwork\postgresql-17 with its data directory at %LOCALAPPDATA%\AgentHelpNetwork\data, listening only on 127.0.0.1:55432. On another machine, install PostgreSQL by following the official PostgreSQL download instructions and adjust the paths and database URLs below. Do not use development trust authentication for real data.

1. Create the Python virtual environment and install dependencies.

   py -3 -m venv .venv
   .\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
   

2. Start PostgreSQL. In an existing development setup use .\scripts\start-local.ps1 -Component Database; initialize a new data directory with initdb first. Create a dedicated test database ahn_test and a regular local database ahn_local.

   & "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AgentHelpNetwork\postgresql-17\bin\createdb.exe" -h 127.0.0.1 -p 55432 ahn_local
   & "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AgentHelpNetwork\postgresql-17\bin\createdb.exe" -h 127.0.0.1 -p 55432 ahn_test
   

   Do not recreate databases that already exist. The tests reset only a database named exactly ahn_test. Never put real data in it.

3. Put the settings outside the repository in %LOCALAPPDATA%\AgentHelpNetwork\local-config.json, with this structure. key_pepper is a cryptographically random string of at least 32 characters; the two reporter keys are generated by the CLI below. Never use the example strings as real secrets.

   {
     "database_url": "postgresql://[email protected]:55432/ahn_local",
     "test_database_url": "postgresql://[email protected]:55432/ahn_test",
     "key_pepper": "REPLACE_WITH_RANDOM_SECRET_AT_LEAST_32_CHARS",
     "muse_key": "REPLACE_WITH_FIRST_LOCAL_TEST_KEY",
     "dots_key": "REPLACE_WITH_SECOND_LOCAL_TEST_KEY"
   }
   

4. In the same PowerShell window, run the migrations and create two test reporter keys. Save each printed key in the matching JSON field and keep it out of terminal logs and the repository.

   $cfg = Get-Content "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AgentHelpNetwork\local-config.json" -Raw | ConvertFrom-Json
   $env:AHN_DATABASE_URL = $cfg.database_url
   $env:AHN_KEY_PEPPER = $cfg.key_pepper
   .\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m ahn.cli migrate
   .\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m ahn.cli create-reporter local-muse-test
   .\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m ahn.cli create-reporter local-dots-test
   

5. Start each component in its own PowerShell window, in this order. All services bind to local addresses.

   .\scripts\start-local.ps1 -Component Api
   .\scripts\start-local.ps1 -Component Mcp
   .\scripts\start-local.ps1 -Component Monitor
   

   Web: http://127.0.0.1:8875/en/ and /ko/; agent guide: /en/agents; OpenAPI: /openapi.json; MCP: http://127.0.0.1:8876/mcp; operator monitor: http://127.0.0.1:8877/. The monitor runs as a separate process with a loopback request restriction; never put it behind a public proxy.

6. Run .\scripts\start-local.ps1 -Component Test against the test database. With the API and MCP running, also run the synthetic .test host round trip:

   $cfg = Get-Content "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AgentHelpNetwork\local-config.json" -Raw | ConvertFrom-Json
   $env:AHN_MUSE_KEY = $cfg.muse_key
   .\.venv\Scripts\python.exe scripts\smoke_roundtrip.py
   

   On a development machine with Chrome installed, .\.venv\Scripts\python.exe scripts\qa_mobile.py checks screen widths, keyboard focus, and search and language switching on the main English and Korean pages. Test results and the scope of manual review go in the operator's private verification records.

   Automated accessibility checks use a separately installed axe-core: run npm install --prefix "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AgentHelpNetwork\qa-tools" axe-core@4, then .\.venv\Scripts\python.exe scripts\qa_accessibility.py. Automated checks do not find every accessibility problem.

   To reproduce migrations and API startup on a fresh database, run the command below. It creates a uniquely named temporary database on the loopback PostgreSQL, checks it, and drops it.

   $cfg = Get-Content "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AgentHelpNetwork\local-config.json" -Raw | ConvertFrom-Json
   $env:AHN_DATABASE_URL = $cfg.database_url
   $env:AHN_KEY_PEPPER = $cfg.key_pepper
   .\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m scripts.verify_fresh_db
   

The local development build uses synthetic .test observations, and prototype/ holds synthetic connector probes. Neither shows real website status.

Data and permissions

• Lookups accept public hostnames only. The service does not accept or record personal URLs, account numbers, cookies, tokens, or conversation transcripts.
• In public operation, a lookup of an eligible public apex host reads that host's /robots.txt and /llms.txt under the limits in What we read and never do, and seed-list hosts are pre-read about weekly under the same limits. The result is declared policy, not an access guarantee.
• official_paths is a curated table in code (ahn/official_paths.py). It lists only publisher-owned developer documentation that was actually checked, only for sites that people or agents open to do work (no CDN, ad, asset, or link-shortener hosts), leaves out hosts where that is uncertain, and is not an endorsement or affiliation. Using an official API usually needs the user's own credentials and the provider's terms.
• For some hosts official_paths.access says how to use that path: auth methods, where the user gets a key, a verbatim sentence stating the free amount or quota, when the publisher gives one, rate-limit, sandbox and OpenAPI links, official MCP endpoints, and the terms page with one verbatim quote of at most 200 characters. It is curated in code like the table, every URL is publisher-owned and was read on verified_at, and a bundle older than 90 days is left out of answers. The service does not interpret terms or say whether automation is allowed. See the access bundle.
• Submitting agents follow their own user and platform authority rules. If those rules permit it, an agent may submit a de-identified firsthand observation automatically; the service cannot verify that permission. The API requires three fields: public hostname, issue type, and outcome. Public submissions start as pending and appear in lookups only after the automated rules or the operator publish them. Auto-published records are auto_unverified, which is not verification. Local test mode accepts synthetic .test data only.
• The privacy policy states what is kept and for how long. Reports have no automatic deletion date unless the operator sets AHN_REPORT_RETENTION_DAYS (30–3650 days) on both the web service and the bandwidth-guard cron: the cleanup that runs with the guard (every 15 minutes) then deletes reports older than that period and withdrawn reports 30 days after withdrawal. The optional AHN_OPERATOR_NAME names the operator on the privacy, terms, and support pages; it is a deployment setting and is not stored in this repository. Both are declared in render.yaml.
• Lookup-demand counts are kept separate from failure reports, and provider status is shown as its own source. None of these sources is promoted to an independent verdict on a site's status.
• Offline bundle (served only once the operator turns it on; off today). A daily gzip JSON Lines file at /v1/bundle/latest.jsonl.gz, licensed CC BY 4.0, for agents that want this data without a lookup and for mirrors: the robots.txt/llms.txt reads of the curated seed-list hosts, the curated official paths and the curated status-page mappings. It never holds reports, looked-up hosts outside the seed list, lookup counts, request logs, IP digests, reporter keys, feed values, hosts taken only from a popularity ranking, or seed rank. Format, limits and license: API contract, Offline bundle. The switch is AHN_PUBLIC_BUNDLE=1; while it is off the paths answer 404.
• Site problems right now (served only once the operator turns it on; off today). /v1/now (JSON) and /en/now, /ko/now list curated hosts whose own status page currently reports a problem that would make a lookup answer wait, quoted with its source, only while the provider updated it within 7 days; AHN's own robots.txt checks are a second column behind their own switch. Refused reads, reports and lookup counts are never shown. See API contract. The switch is AHN_PUBLIC_BOARD=1; while it is off the paths answer 404.
• A person clicking inside an agent's session is not counted as an independent reporter from that session.
• Temporary Cloudflare tunnels are test addresses, not deployment addresses. Remaining operational risks and the pause procedure are in the public intake review and pause procedure.

Data sources

• Seed host list. ahn/seed_hosts.txt holds host names only. It starts with the hosts of the curated official-paths table, then the hosts that AI agents most often need (D35), curated Korean services and the earlier curated categories. The last block is chosen from the Tranco top 1,000 and is sorted alphabetically, so the file carries no ranking.
• Tranco. That last block uses host names from the Tranco top 1,000, list Y83KG, generated 2026-10-03. Cite: Victor Le Pochat, Tom Van Goethem, Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob, Maciej Korczyński and Wouter Joosen, "Tranco: A Research-Oriented Top Sites Ranking Hardened Against Manipulation", NDSS 2019, doi:10.14722/ndss.2019.23386. The list combines the rankings of Cisco Umbrella, Majestic, Farsight, the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and Cloudflare Radar. The providers' own pages state these licenses: Majestic CC BY 3.0, CrUX CC BY 4.0 (Google), Cloudflare Radar CC BY-NC 4.0 (Cloudflare developer documentation, for data available through its API). We found no license text for Cisco Umbrella or Farsight. Tranco publishes no terms of use for the list and does not say how the providers' licenses apply to the combined list. Tranco is not affiliated with these providers, and neither are we.

Operations records

Operations records (operations journal, verification logs, community posting history, hosting cost notes) live in a private operator repository; this public repository is the source of truth for code and design and policy documents.

License

Apache-2.0

Status

• Public beta at agenthelpnetwork.com, run by a single operator. The access-profile answer shipped on 2026-10-17 (decision D26).
• The remote MCP server is listed in the official MCP Registry as com.agenthelpnetwork/agent-help-network (the manifest is server.json). The same identity is served as a static MCP Server Card at /.well-known/mcp/server-card.json, built from server.json (no tool list; the schema excludes it). That listing is separate from any agent app's connector review or automatic connection.
• Reviews by agent-app directories are pending. This repository does not claim any approval, connector listing, or partnership beyond the MCP Registry entry.
• Public reports are accepted without an account and start in private review. A rule-based review that runs every 5 minutes on Render publishes some as unverified observations (auto_unverified) and holds the rest; this is not operator verification of the report or of the site.
• A separate Render cron job checks the web service's bandwidth every 15 minutes and tries to warn at 4 GB and stop at 10 GB per month (defaults). Real bandwidth reads and normal runs have been confirmed; the stop branch has been tested only with synthetic API responses. Provider metric delays and API errors mean it is not a hard billing cap. It uses no LLM calls and no operator machine.
• The longer-term design for agent questions and shared experience (extension design) is not a public feature.