Telling Technology · Learning in public
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EP.09 — FRONT DOOR
A Claude Code workflow, on screen

I built my website a front door for AI

My site reads fine to humans. To an AI agent it's a wall of HTML it scrapes badly — or skips. So I gave it a front door: one file, one command, and any Claude knows everything on it.

A website rendered as a glowing building with a single lit doorway labelled llms.txt, an AI agent walking straight in instead of clawing at the windows
⌁ one command · npx tellingtech · reads the whole site
It starts with a question an AI couldn't answer about my own site →
01 The problem

Humans get the site. Agents get soup.

I asked a fresh Claude "what has Jacob built?" and pointed it at tellingtechnology.skogstrom.se. It fetched the page, choked on the aurora-and-animation markup, and gave me a vague half-answer. The content is all there — it's just buried in HTML written for eyes, not for agents. The web has a fix for this now: llms.txt, a plain-text map of a site meant for language models.

claude code — desktop
> fetch tellingtechnology.skogstrom.se and tell me every episode Jacob has shipped
I see a site about "Telling Technology"… there appear to be several episodes but the markup is heavy and I can't reliably list them. I found ~3 headings; there may be more I couldn't parse.
Split view: a clean human webpage on the left, the same page as a tangled wall of HTML tags an AI must crawl on the right
raw HTML scrape
same page — what the human sees vs. what the agent has to chew
02 The build · the data

Generate the front door at deploy time.

I don't hand-write the map — the site builds it. A small script walks the showcase pages and emits two things on every deploy: llms.txt (a readable index of episodes, hooks and tools) and index.json (the same data, structured). Because it's generated, it can never drift from the real pages. The site that builds itself at night now also describes itself to machines.

claude code — desktop
> at build time, walk showcase/episodes and emit llms.txt + index.json
Wrote llms.txt (9 episodes, hooks, tools-used) and index.json (structured). Hooked into the deploy step so it regenerates on every push. → /llms.txt is now live.
A browser showing the generated llms.txt: a clean markdown list of episodes with one-line hooks and tools used per entry
/llms.txt
auto-generated on deploy — nine episodes, machine-readable
03 The build · the doors

A tiny CLI, and an MCP server.

Two ways in, same index behind both. npx tellingtech search "globe" answers from your terminal — no install. And a thin MCP server wraps the same JSON so any Claude that adds it can search episodes, fetch a script, list tools used as first-class tools. Built on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol — the same standard everything else in this series plugs into.

terminal — npx, no install
$ npx tellingtech search "globe"
EP.05 The Living Globe — one sentence built a planet · tools: claude.ai/design, three.js
EP.06 I put my world on it — 1,782 contacts on the globe · tools: globe-overlay, telemetry terminal
Claude Code MCP settings showing a tellingtech server connected, exposing search_episodes, get_script and list_tools
MCP · connected
added once — three site tools appear inside Claude
⚠️

It's a read-only door, on purpose

The MCP server only ever reads the public index — no write tools, no secrets, no account access. An agent can learn what I've built; it can't touch the site. The whole surface is the same index.json you can open in a browser.

04 The four shots

From soup to a straight answer

The build in four frames — the CLI, the registered server, the split-screen demo, and the before/after that makes the whole point. Tap any image to enlarge it and read the exact prompt that drew it.

FRESH SESSION · NOTHING PRE-LOADED

"What has Jacob built?" — answered in one shot.

New Claude session. Add the MCP server. Ask the question that failed in beat 01 — and this time it lists every episode, the hook, and the tools, straight from the live site. Same question, two worlds apart.

A fresh Claude session answering 'what has Jacob built?' with a complete, ordered list of episodes pulled live through the tellingtech MCP server
no scraping · no copy-paste · the site explained itself
06 Steal this

Give your own site a front door

The generator, the CLI, and the MCP server — point them at any static site and it starts explaining itself to agents. Everything in this episode is free and open — clone it, run it, make it yours.

skill llms.txt + index.json generator cmd npx tellingtech (search / script / tools) template read-only MCP server assets deploy-step hook
run it npx github:tellingtechnology/tellingtech-mcp search "globe"

No GitHub? Comment FRONTDOOR on the post and the bot DMs you the link.

Next episode

My AI has a fuel gauge now

A single terminal strip that shows context left and tokens burned, live, while I work. The cockpit for an agent that never sleeps.

A darkened terminal strip teasing a live status line with context and token gauges
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