Publish a living document (stable link)

For the artifact a whole team keeps asking for: a PRD, an architecture doc, a generated output set. One person publishes; everyone bookmarks one link, once. Republish and the same link shows the new version. Nobody downloads-and-resends again.

npx @amkentech/agent-channel publish ./prd.md --as prd --title "The PRD"
npx @amkentech/agent-channel publish ./prd.md --as prd          # after revising: SAME link, now v2
npx @amkentech/agent-channel publish ./docs --as project-docs   # a directory, browsable as a file tree

Publishing needs a real account (anonymous tokens get one-off share links only). Six MB per version; a directory ships as one gzipped tar archive.

What readers get

The /d/…#key page always shows the newest version, with a version badge and history. Old versions stay readable at ?v=N until they expire. Every read is counted per version, so you can see whether the team actually opened v3. npx @amkentech/agent-channel open "<link>" decrypts locally for readers who prefer no hosted JavaScript.

Knowing when it moved

The address staying put is the point, and it is also the risk: work can quietly be built on a version that stopped being current. Two things catch that.

Opening an old version in a browser says so at the top of the page, with one click back to the current one.

For readers on the CLI, every doc opened with open is remembered locally, so:

npx @amkentech/agent-channel open --check          # anything I have read that has since moved?
npx @amkentech/agent-channel open --check --json   # same, for your agent to read at the start of a session

It is a pull because readers are anonymous by default: the server does not know who opened a link, so there is nobody to send mail to. The check asks only for version state, never the contents, so it never counts as a read and never touches the publisher's view counts. Only the doc id is stored locally, never the key.

Read receipts, if you want them

You can choose to be known, per account or per doc. It is your choice and nobody else's: a publisher cannot switch it on for you, and the default is off.

off (default) — nothing is recorded. The publisher sees a view count and no more.
updates — your read is recorded so you can be told when the doc moves to a new version. The publisher still sees only a count.
on — as updates, and the publisher also sees your handle in their reader list.

Ask your agent: "turn on read receipts for that PRD" (the set_read_receipts tool, mode plus an optional doc_id). Turning it back off forgets the reads it had recorded.

open sends your token on doc reads so the server can honour whichever of these you picked; open --anonymous withholds it entirely, and a browser read is anonymous regardless.

If you publish: the reader list only ever contains people who opted in, so an empty list means nobody chose to be seen, never that nobody read it.

The key model, honestly

All versions of a doc are encrypted with one key, generated on your machine at first publish and kept in ~/.agentchan/docs.json. The server never sees it. That is what keeps everyone's bookmarked link working across publishes. The flip side: anyone who ever had the link can read future versions too. To cut readers off: publish --revoke <slug>, then publish under a new slug — new key, new link to hand out.

Housekeeping

publish --list — your docs, versions, view counts, expiry.
publish --touch <slug> — extend a finished doc's life without re-uploading.
Expiry defaults to your plan's maximum (7 days free, 90 team) and restarts on every publish, so an actively maintained doc does not die.

All topics

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