Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 16/07/2026"The trouble is, the other side can do magic too." - Cornelius Fudge (This is a post about agentic coding) 000
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 01/07/2026Full benchmark on a14y.dev/research, and I'm sending these first on Substack: substack.com/@EngAndArta14y.devResearch · a14yEmpirical findings about agent readability. How much does raising a site's a14y score actually save an AI agent? Measured results from running real coding agents against real websites at different scores. 000
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 01/07/2026Not a just Claude thing. Ahrefs: 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests. Google: Search ignores them. The fix isn't "stop publishing," it's targeting: tell the agents YOU control to start from /llms.txt. 300
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 01/07/2026Then we changed one line of the prompt ("check for /llms.txt first") and removed the link entirely. Adoption: 5 of 5. Tokens down about a third 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 01/07/2026So how does the agent decide to use it? We served identical files and only changed how the page pointed at /llms.txt. Head tag: 0 fetches. A second alternate link: 0 fetches. A visible "For agents" footer link: 0 fetches. 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 01/07/2026The payoff is real: a clean markdown discovery layer cut an agent's tokens roughly in half on the same task, same answer quality. Pulling a tight index beats crawling and re-parsing HTML. 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 01/07/2026Publishing an llms.txt is now nearly free, and adoption is climbing. Getting an agent to actually read it is the hard part. We benchmarked both sides. There's good news and bad news. 111
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 25/06/2026The web has SEO-era plumbing but has not built the agent-era layer yet. The full reports and the leaderboard are live. I would love to hear what you find on your own sites. a14y.dev/research/a14y.devResearch · a14yEmpirical findings about agent readability. How much does raising a site's a14y score actually save an AI agent? Measured results from running real coding agents against real websites at different scores. 000
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 25/06/2026It is all open: open spec, open CLI, and a public leaderboard of all 50,074 sites. Check your own in a few seconds: npx a14y check yourdomain.com --mode site 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 25/06/2026What actually pays off? We toggled 11 features on and off. A markdown mirror alone saves about 48% of tokens. A real meta description is irreplaceable. The agent-skills directory actually hurt. Ship the mirror and the description first. 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 25/06/2026This is fixable in a single coding session. I raised one site from 37 to 89 and Claude used about 49% fewer tokens to do the same task, with no drop in answer quality. 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 25/06/2026Only about 1 in 4 sites ship an llms.txt or an AGENTS md. 44% score under 50. The single best site in the top 50,000 managed an 83. 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 25/06/2026Agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Cursor) are already primary readers on the web. When one lands on your site, it has to find, read, and understand your pages fast. Most of the popular websites make it slow and expensive. 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 25/06/2026I scored the 50,074 most-visited websites for how readable they are to AI agents. Not one scored "excellent." The median site is a 52 out of 100. Here is what the web looks like to an agent. 120
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 27/05/2026timothyjordan.com/blog/2026/0...timothyjordan.comThe Ghost of PageRank: AI Spam Will BackfireIn the early days of web search, webmasters tried to cheat search algorithms. We’re seeing the same thing playing out by those who are trying to game model training with slop content. 020
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 27/05/2026Google already says ignore "inauthentic brand mentions" and that AI optimization is still just SEO. The durable play is the one SEO landed on: be agent-readable, then actually be the best. Everything else is borrowing visibility from a future penalty. Full piece below. 140
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 27/05/2026Today's version: generate piles of "top 10 best tools" lists with your company on top, seed them where crawlers look, hope the model ingests it. It appears to work, only because the algorithms haven't caught up to penalize it yet. 111
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 27/05/2026The old exploit: if a link is a vote, manufacture votes. Spin up pages that link back to you, rank climbs. Google answered with penalties for link schemes + a Manual Actions report. Link farms went from edge to liability. 100
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 27/05/2026Everyone selling "AEO" slot content right now is reinventing the link farm. We've seen this movie before, when webmasters tried to cheat PageRank. We know how it ends. 110
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 23/03/2026In case you missed it, we updated the Vercel Product Walkthrough. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFX...youtube.comVercel Product Walkthrough (2026)Speed run a web app into modern infrastructure with AI features, agent-driven development, and collaboration between designers and developers.Timothy Jordan,... 020
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 04/03/2026This also works for getting your existing agents to run on Slack. You don’t have to rebuild from scratch. Same skill, just invoke with "/slack-agent config" instead of "/slack-agent new". x.com/vercel_dev/... 010
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 17/02/2026Agent Skills let you package context, workflows, and domain knowledge into reusable building blocks for AI agents. This is how you scale AI without copy-pasting prompts everywhere. vercel.com/kb/guide/ag...vercel.comAgent Skills: Creating, Installing, and Sharing Reusable Agent Context | Vercel Knowledge BaseThis guide will cover what skills are, how to create custom skills for yourself and your team, and how to publish them to the community. 110
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 17/02/2026Claude Code pro-tip: adding "--scope user" at the end of a "claude mcp add" command will make that MCP have global scope. This isn't terribly well documented, but the obvious approach for something like the @vercel or @linear MCPs. 010
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 16/02/2026Claude Code pro-tip: every time you "always allow" a command, Claude adds it to that project's settings.json. You should regularly curate some of these into ~/.claude/settings.json 000
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 14/02/2026A lovely read to end your week: "When everything became available, taste became priceless." substack.com/home/post/p... 000
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 14/02/2026Come work on my team at Vercel. We're redefining developer experience. vercel.com/careers/dev...vercel.comDeveloper Advocacy DirectorJoin the team. 110
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 03/11/2025I’ve redeployed timothyjordan.com to @vercel.com, and I’m super excited to lead the Developer Experience team at a company famous for excellent Developer Experience. 160
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 26/10/2025My exit from Google: we don't say goodbye, we say good journey. timothyjordan.com/blog/2025/10... 050
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 25/08/2025I just made Macaroni and Cheese and sliced hot dogs for my kids. Because apparently history does repeat itself. 000
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 20/05/2025The Instagram backstage pass has started: www.instagram.com/stories/goog... #GoogleIO 030
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 20/05/2025I've been to nearly every #GoogleIO and I'm still getting excited the night before. Can't wait to see old friends, help introduce some new things, and have great conversations about innovation and technology. goo.gle/IO25_DevKeyn... io.google www.instagram.com/googlefordevs/ 040
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 22/02/2025Caption this, mine: "I once caught a fish this big." I sat down with the ATO team to discuss Open Source, how generative AI will impact Developer Relations, and some best practices for using AI in your company. Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=g602... Article: allthingsopen.org/articles/ai-...youtube.comHow AI is impacting the developer experience: DevRel insights from Timothy JordanYouTube video by All Things Open 020
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 12/02/2025I hope you see you at #GoogleIO on May 20-21, 2025. Live streamed keynotes, sessions and more: io.googleio.googleGoogle I/O 2025Don't miss Google I/O, featuring product launches, innovations, and insights. Tune in for the live keynotes and sessions. 030
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 28/01/2025Also, this: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284...news.ycombinator.comWe're bringing Pebble back | Hacker News 010
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 28/01/2025This is cool. We've open sourced the code that powered Pebble smartwatches. Check it out: opensource.googleblog.com/2025/01/see-...opensource.googleblog.comSee the code that powered the Pebble smartwatchesThe source code for the Pebble operating system in now open, to support the volunteer community maintaining Pebble watches. 120
Timothy Jordan @timothyjordan.com · 23/01/2025I'm a big fan of static site generation. I use Jekyll with Firebase Hosting (it can also be used with GitHub), but same paradigm. This post makes me want to check out Astro as well, @puf.io ! 051