What problem does Aethelforge solve?

When an AI agent acts on behalf of a person, it needs structured surfaces rather than scraped screens to discover what a merchant sells, see current availability, and place an order with a confirmation that holds up after the fact. Aethelforge defines that surface and provides adapters that drop into both modern commerce stacks and the long tail of WordPress and WooCommerce sites.

How does the merchant SDK work?

A merchant installs the SDK alongside their existing storefront. It exposes a structured catalog, an orders endpoint, and a webhooks listener under a versioned protocol so agent traffic does not need to scrape, screen-read, or guess. A WordPress bridge plugin gives the same surface to merchants without engineering teams. The SDK is in alpha at a validated v0.1 milestone.

How does Aethelforge relate to Axis?

Axis is the consumer side of the same network. The merchant SDK answers how an agent buys from a store. Axis answers how an agent learns a household is about to run out of a product. Both products read from the same underlying graph of consumption events and merchant catalogs, and both publish into the live operations feed.

What is the live operations feed?

The live ops feed is a public stream of platform events — merchant onboardings, catalog updates, order confirmations, and replenishment signals — that subscribers can watch in real time without polling. It exists to make the platform legible from the outside, so partners and downstream agents can build dashboards, alerts, or reactive flows directly against the network.

Aethelforge

Agent-commerce platform: structured surfaces for AI agents to discover, transact, and report.

Abstract

Aethelforge is a platform for agent commerce — the structured surface AI agents use to discover catalogs, place orders, and report state back to the people they act on behalf of. The platform spans a merchant SDK for modern stacks, a WordPress bridge for the long tail of small merchants, a consumer product (Axis) that demonstrates the receiving end of the protocol, and a live operations feed that broadcasts platform events to subscribers.

Problem

Agents acting on behalf of a person cannot reliably operate against an interface designed for human eyes. Catalogs that render through dozens of components, prices computed in client-side JavaScript, and checkouts gated by anti-bot heuristics all assume a human at the keyboard.

Scraping is brittle, screen-reading is slow, and neither produces a confirmation that survives a chargeback dispute. Merchants get traffic they cannot attribute. Agents get state they cannot trust.

The structured-commerce-for-agents problem needs a protocol, an SDK that drops into existing stacks, and a long-tail bridge for merchants that do not have engineering teams. Without all three, the network does not form.

Approach

Merchant SDK

The SDK is a small set of TypeScript packages a merchant installs alongside their existing storefront. It exposes a structured catalog, an orders endpoint, and a webhooks listener under a versioned protocol — the surface area an agent needs to discover, transact, and confirm without scraping.

A WordPress bridge plugin gives the same surface to small merchants without engineering teams, which is where the long tail of commerce lives.

Consumer side: Axis

Axis is the consumer-facing demonstration of the receiving end of the protocol. It passively monitors a household's purchase history through forwarded receipts, predicts replenishment moments per product, and surfaces one-tap reorders. The agent that places that reorder transacts against the merchant SDK described above — the loop closes inside Aethelforge.

Live operations feed

A public stream of platform events — merchant onboardings, catalog updates, order confirmations, and replenishment signals — published over a managed pub/sub layer. Subscribers can build dashboards, alerts, or reactive downstream agents directly against the feed without polling.

The feed exists to make the platform legible from the outside. A protocol no one can observe is hard to trust.

Marketing site

A Next.js + SST shell at aethelforge.ai presents the platform to both human and agent visitors. A ?view=agent query parameter renders an agent-optimized view of the same content for the case where an agent is doing discovery rather than a human reading marketing copy.

Status

Merchant SDK at v0.1 milestone with internal validation suite passing.
WordPress bridge plugin code-complete, paired with the SDK release.
llms.txt agent-discovery files deployed across the iSimplifyMe site network.
Marketing site at aethelforge.ai live on staging.
Live operations feed: schema and event types defined; ingest and broadcast paths in active development.
Axis is in alpha at axis.aethelforge.ai with two brands in the production catalog.

Aethelforge

What is Aethelforge?