Agent experience

As coding becomes solved by AI, developer tools need to be designed for agent users as much as human ones. "Agent experience" is a problem I have been focusing on at Chroma.

The first step is legible docs. Any developer product benefits from models being aware of it, but must fight the stale training data of agents. To address this at Chroma, our team moved the docs to Mintlify, which improved agent accessibility, such as with an llms.txt file. Mintlify also supports MCP, giving agents persistent tool access with search. Next.js has taken this a step further in a way I think is prescient, bundling their docs in the package and setting agent directions to read local documentation before writing any code.

But docs tell an agent what is possible, not what is recommended. With Chroma Cloud, the recommended path means using our SDKs, using both dense and sparse vectors with hybrid search, and probably using Chroma's hosted embedding functions for ease of integration. There are also nuanced directions for existing applications, such as how to model multi-tenant workloads and how to migrate existing data. To bridge that gap, I added a dedicated "Prompt quickstart" to Chroma Cloud, a block of text users can copy into their coding agent's context. Beyond sharing the docs as a resource, it gives opinionated directions for how to set up the product. Credential management is a concern here. You do not want to put API keys into the model context, so the quickstart includes a separate .env file download with credentials.

As I showed prompt quickstart to some early users, one said, "that's cool, but why do I as a human need to sign up? Can't the agent do that?"

That idea stayed in the back of my mind, until Stripe presented a potential solution.

Today, Stripe Projects is launching as a toolchain for agent-first commerce: agents can sign up for services, connect billing, provision resources, and manage secrets without a human in the loop. I have been collaborating with the Stripe team on the early protocol, and built Chroma as a launch integration. Try it out: stripe projects add chroma/database.

Agent-first commerce is fundamentally a trust problem. When a human signs up for a service, they provide an email, enter a credit card, and agree to terms. An agent has none of those things. Stripe is uniquely positioned to solve this because they are already a trusted third party on both sides of the relationship: applications trust Stripe's identity verification and payment guarantees, and customers trust Stripe with their billing data. A new "payment token" protocol extends that trust layer so agents can provision paid services on behalf of their human operators. As an application developer, integrating with Stripe Projects felt like setting up a "Google Sign-in" flow, relying on Stripe as an identity provider backed by their existing KYC guarantees.

Stripe Projects is early, but it points to a reality where developer tools maintain two experiences: one for humans, and one for agents.