Posts

My feed did it again. Third time in six weeks: something launches in the agentic commerce space, the usual suspects celebrate, and I find myself writing about it. In late December I published an architecture for agentic travel distribution that I’d been designing for months; that one was proactive, and the reactions suggested it resonated. Then Google launched UCP two weeks later, and I wrote about what travel needs from it. Now ERC-8004, the Ethereum standard for “Trustless Agents,” goes live on mainnet, and my timeline is a chorus of people announcing that AI agents finally have identity, reputation, and wallets. (I managed to resist when Coinbase launched x402, so at least there’s that.) ...

Weekend 2: when Plan A fails, Plan B works in ten minutes, and things get recursive. In the previous article, I got the foundations working: site live, domains sorted, corpus structure in place. (If you’re new here, Article 1 explains why I’m building this.) Weekend 2 was supposed to be the payoff: make the corpus queryable, connect it to Claude via MCP, and finally stop copy-pasting context into every conversation. The plan was Khoj. The plan didn’t survive contact with reality. ...

Weekend 1 of building a personal knowledge corpus: what worked, what didn’t, and what I learned about AI-proofing a website. In the previous article, I outlined the problem: context trapped in chat sessions, knowledge scattered across tools, published work invisible to AI agents because it lives in walled gardens. The thesis was files plus semantic search plus MCP integration equals thinking that persists. The plan was three weekends of building. Weekend 1 was about foundations: get a site live, get domains sorted, get email working, create the corpus structure. The unsexy infrastructure that everything else depends on. Here’s what actually happened. ...

Building a corpus that remembers Where does your thinking go to die? Mine dies in several places, and I suspect yours does too. Chat sessions with Claude that end and take context with them. Bookmarked articles I’ll “read later” (I won’t, and we both know it). Screenshots of whiteboards rotting in my camera roll because I told myself I’d transcribe them “when I have time.” Notes emailed to myself, now buried under seventeen newsletters I also meant to read. PDFs downloaded with great intentions, never opened again. The article I know I read about that exact topic, somewhere, unfindable when I actually need it. ...

A follow-up to “Why your AI travel agent can dream up the perfect trip but can’t book it” I published that article on December 29th. Two weeks later, back at my desk with inbox overflowing, I find that Google has launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, co-developed with Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy, and Wayfair, and endorsed by twenty-plus others including Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe (apparently I wasn’t the only one busy during the holidays). Their roadmap explicitly mentions “Travel, Services” as upcoming verticals. ...

The travel digital identity gap, and why blockchain bridges it Late September, I’m in Heraklion for our Travel Un’chained conference. Michael Ros from Sleap.io and I are at the resort reception, and they hand us forms (name, ID number, address, all the fields) before taking our ID cards and disappearing to make photocopies. In 2025. Facial recognition at airports, digital wallets on our phones, and a process still requiring a paper scan. I know we both used the anecdote to smile with other attendees, so with this article I officially exhaust its value as storytelling. ...

And how the infrastructure we’ve been building for 2.5 years might finally make it possible It’s December 2025, and AI agents are everywhere. ChatGPT plans your honeymoon to the Maldives. Claude designs a three-week backpacking itinerary through Japan. Perplexity finds you that off-the-beaten-path trattoria in Bologna. Then comes the moment of truth: “Book it.” And the magic collapses. Your agent stutters. It can’t actually check if that boutique ryokan has availability. It hallucinates a confirmation number. It sends you to Booking.com, which means starting the search all over again. Or worse: a Spanish influencer couple recently missed a flight because ChatGPT incorrectly advised them they didn’t need a visa for Puerto Rico, without mentioning the ESTA. The AI was confidently, dangerously wrong. ...

Programme context and Chain4Travel’s participation In late 2024, the European Central Bank (ECB) launched an innovation platform seeking “pioneers” and “visionaries” to collaborate on digital euro development. The programme aimed to demonstrate how conditional payments could be implemented technically, provide opportunities for participants to interact with simulated digital euro interfaces, and explore additional use cases for the digital currency. As part of their preparation phase for a potential digital euro launch, the ECB invited stakeholders including merchants, banks, payment service providers, fintech companies, and technical experts to participate in this groundbreaking initiative. ...