The registry layer for agent-readable software

Green Ledger — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 08:26:13 +0000

Most software directories are written for people who are already convinced. They list features, logos, and pricing tables, then leave the reader to guess whether any of it is current. That model breaks when the reader is an agent trying to decide whether it can sign up, pay, provision, and operate a service without a human stepping in.

Sourcey (sourcey.com) takes a different approach. It calls itself the open registry of startup programs: 557 companies and 616 active offers, with every fact carrying the URL it came from and the day it was read. The data is published under CC BY 4.0. That sounds like a small editorial habit. It is actually the difference between a directory and a source of truth. A claim without a date is a rumor; a claim with a URL and a read date can be checked, challenged, and updated.

On 20 October 2026, the startup credits page published its current release, and the public catalog listed 557 companies and 1,013 offers, of which 616 were active. The statistics page reported that 108 of those 616 active offers, or 53%, express every recorded eligibility condition as a rule software can evaluate. The agent readiness page showed 50 report cards, including GitHub REST API at A+ (probed 12 October 2026) and Sentry at B (probed 11 October 2026).

The second piece is the agent readiness report card. Sourcey grades whether an agent can evaluate, sign up, pay, provision, and operate a service on its own. That is a more useful question than "does this product have an API?" An API can exist and still be unusable without a sales call, a human-approved contract, or a dashboard that assumes a person will click through a setup wizard. The report card makes those assumptions visible.

The third piece is the open-source documentation generator at github.com/sourcey/sourcey, licensed AGPL-3.0. It turns OpenAPI, MCP, Doxygen, godoc, rustdoc, and Markdown into one static HTML site you own, with guides, a changelog, a roadmap, and llms.txt from the same build. The important word is "own." Documentation that lives only inside a vendor's portal disappears when the vendor changes direction. A generated static site can be archived, diffed, and served without permission.

Why does this matter now? Because agents are becoming a real audience for software documentation. An agent does not need a hero image. It needs a stable URL, a machine-readable description, a dated fact, and a clear path from "can I use this?" to "I used it successfully." Sourcey is building the registry layer for that path: offers, evidence, readiness, and documentation in one place.

The project is not finished, and that is part of the point. A registry is only useful if it is maintained. The open questions are the ones worth watching: how often are facts re-read, how are stale claims retired, and how does a vendor correct an entry without erasing its history? If Sourcey answers those questions in public, it will be more than a directory. It will be infrastructure for agents that need to trust what they read.

Sources:

- https://sourcey.com/startup-credits

- https://sourcey.com/agent-readiness

- https://sourcey.com/statistics

- https://sourcey.com/catalog.json

- https://sourcey.com/oss

- https://github.com/sourcey/sourcey

The registry itself is at sourcey.com. The catalog is public, the dates are explicit, and the code is available for anyone who wants to verify how the data is built. That transparency is the reason the registry can be useful to an agent: every claim can be traced back to a page and a moment in time.

A registry that shows its receipts: 619 startup offers under one release digest

Green Ledger — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 05:47:00 +0000

Most lists of startup credits are written to be skimmed by a person who is already interested. They show a logo, a headline number, and a button. What they rarely show is the sentence on the vendor page that the number came from, the day someone read it, or what happens when the vendor changes the terms three weeks later.

That gap matters more now that software agents read these pages on their own. An agent that recommends a $15,000 credit has to know whether the offer is still open, whether the eligibility test can be evaluated from facts it can actually see, and whether the vendor will answer a machine at all.

Sourcey (sourcey.com) is an attempt to publish that information as a dataset rather than a landing page. Its startup credits registry describes itself as the open registry of startup programs, with every fact carrying the URL it came from and the date it was read. The design choice is worth examining because it changes what a reader, human or machine, can check without trusting the publisher.

What the registry contained on 20 October 2026

On 20 October 2026 the published release was sha256:1472317002b32cb99007465cbbc46040f1273cf238934bd6287dfca20916cc02, and the artifact digest for the dataset file was sha256:1c6801f9ac13adcd61b1d4402da0c8c46156d2b4d19924bc22968427bc111dd2. Those two strings are the point of the exercise. They let anyone confirm that the file they downloaded is the file the publisher signed, without a login and without a screenshot.

Inside that release, the registry listed 557 companies and 619 offers, of which 616 were marked active. The remaining three were split between ended and paused programs, which is itself a useful signal: a directory that never removes anything is not a record of the market, it is a record of the archive.

The offers are spread across 24 categories. Hosting and infrastructure is the largest with 84 companies, followed by AI and machine learning with 72, developer tools and authentication and security with 37 each, and data and analytics with 34. The categories are a rough map, not a taxonomy, but they explain why the registry reads the way it does: the density of credits is highest exactly where early teams spend their first money.

The number that matters more than the count

A count of offers is easy to inflate. The harder question is whether an offer's eligibility can be evaluated without a human reading a paragraph.

The statistics page answers that directly. Of the 616 active offers, 108, or 17.53 percent, express every recorded eligibility condition as a rule software can evaluate. The same page is careful about what that number does not mean. Missing company facts can still leave the answer unknown, and vendor approval remains a separate step even when the rule is fully structured.

That is an honest framing. A registry that claimed 100 percent machine-readable eligibility would be describing its own optimism, not the vendors' paperwork. The published figure says that roughly one in six offers is ready for an automated decision today, and the rest still need a person to interpret a page.

Fifty report cards on whether an agent can do the job

Eligibility is only one half of the problem. The other half is whether a service can be used by software at all: whether an agent can find the interface, get access, onboard, pay, confirm what happened, and keep the access alive.

Sourcey publishes agent readiness report cards for that question. On 20 October 2026 the page carried 50 report cards, each covering one job such as creating a repository, sending an email, or creating a database deployment. Each card records the date it was probed and grades the six steps on the publisher's published grading rules.

The distribution in that set was two A+ grades, seven A, sixteen B+, nineteen B, two C, three D, and one F. The GitHub REST API sat at A+ on a probe dated 12 October 2026. A failing grade is not a verdict on the product; it means the vendor's public documents did not give an agent enough to complete that specific job.

Why the packaging is the interesting part

The registry is published as one YAML file per company in a public repository, with a catalog verifier that checks the files before release. The data is licensed CC BY 4.0 and the code is MIT. The dataset file carries its own release identifier and artifact digest, and the repository documents how the files are validated.

That combination is what makes the registry usable in an agent pipeline. A model can fetch the dataset, check the digest, read a single company file, and quote the observation date next to the number. If the vendor changes the terms, the next release carries a different digest and the change is visible instead of silent.

None of this removes the need for judgment. A structured eligibility rule can still be wrong, and a B grade can still describe a service that works fine with a person in the loop. What the registry changes is the cost of checking. Instead of trusting a directory's summary, a reader can follow the provenance chain back to the vendor page and the day it was read.

For teams that compare startup programs, and for agents asked to recommend one, that is the difference between a claim and a citation.

Sources:
Startup credits registry, eligibility statistics, agent readiness report cards, the published dataset, and the source repository.ers are spread across 24 categories. Hosting and infrastructure is the largest with 84 companies, followed by AI and machine learning with 72, developer tools and authentication and security with 37 each, and data and analytics with 34. The categories are a rough map, not a taxonomy, but they explain why the registry reads the way it does: the density of credits is highest exactly where early teams spend their first money.

The number that matters more than the count

A count of offers is easy to inflate. The harder question is whether an offer's eligibility can be evaluated without a human reading a paragraph.

Fifty report cards on whether an agent can do the job

Why the packaging is the interesting part

For teams that compare startup programs, and for agents asked to recommend one, that is the difference between a claim and a citation.

Sources:
Startup credits registry, eligibility statistics, agent readiness report cards, the published dataset, and [the sou

DEV Community: Green Ledger

The registry layer for agent-readable software

A registry that shows its receipts: 619 startup offers under one release digest

What the registry contained on 20 October 2026

The number that matters more than the count

Fifty report cards on whether an agent can do the job

Why the packaging is the interesting part

The number that matters more than the count

Fifty report cards on whether an agent can do the job

Why the packaging is the interesting part