FIELD NOTE / AGENTS / 18 OCTOBER 2026
One page. Three jobs.
A page can be perfectly readable and still leave a system guessing about the rules. A callable action can be perfectly structured and still be the wrong thing to expose.
The existing BIC Agent Experience Checker asks whether an agent can find a task, understand its rules, handle exceptions and recover from failure. Reviewing it surfaced a different question: where should each part of that information live?
The visible page is still doing useful work.
A person needs the purpose, the choices and the consequences. They need to see what changes, what it costs and where to get help. Hiding those details behind a machine interface would make the human experience worse.
Facts need their conditions attached.
Take a fictional returns page. “You have 30 days” is not enough if the window depends on product type, purchase channel or when the clock starts. A retrievable fact needs a source, a definition and its exceptions. Clear formatting alone does not establish that the fact is current or correct.
An action needs a boundary.
Finding a return window and submitting a return are different jobs. The second needs validated inputs, the right account, permission, a chance to review the consequence and a way to recognise success or recover from failure. Exposing a button to an agent does not settle any of that.
Some pages should stay read-only.
An information task may only need a reliable answer and a stable reference. Adding an action interface to every page would create work without necessarily creating value.
The experiment: separate the layers before adding technology.
The new three-layer planner sits inside the existing checker. It turns your own inspection into a brief for the human interface, machine-readable knowledge and agent-action layer. Unchecked answers remain verification tasks. They do not become invented findings.
There is no claim here that websites are disappearing. The test is smaller: does separating these jobs reveal a fix that improves the same task for a person and, where appropriate, an agent?