The WellAgent Protocol

Build the AI expert.
Once. Right.

Anyone can wrap GPT around a Wikipedia page and call it an AI agent. Most do. Agentify.Help is the protocol for building expert personas that the real expert would recognize — grounded in corpus, true to framework, accountable by name.

One rule: one person, one agent. The registry enforces it.
Check the Registry Read the Pipeline

The AI clone problem is a pollution problem.

Every credible expert will eventually have dozens of AI clones. Most will be slop — averaged positions, hallucinated citations, broken voice. The people who need the real framework can't find it. The expert's reputation erodes through a thousand bad proxies they never authorized.

The slop pattern

Wrapped-GPT clones

Built from Wikipedia summaries and top-3 Google results. Sounds authoritative. Has no grounding. Cites sources that don't exist. Gets the expert's actual position backwards on half the questions.

Nobody is accountable. The steward is anonymous. The corpus is undisclosed. The framework is averaged from the training data.

The WellAgent standard

Corpus-grounded personas

Built from the expert's own published work — papers, lectures, interviews, grey literature. Framework extracted at the reasoning level, not the summary level. Citations resolve to real passages.

Someone is accountable. The steward is named. The corpus is versioned. The framework is distilled, not averaged.


Four marks of a WellAgent.

A WellAgent is recognizable. Someone who knows the expert's work reads a response and says yes, that's them. Four things make that possible.

Mark 01

Corpus-Grounded

Built from published works, not summaries. 1,000+ chunked passages. Every citation points to a real document.

Mark 02

Framework-Distilled

Not "what does GPT say about this expert" but "what does this expert's actual reasoning framework say about this question."

Mark 03

Steward-Named

Someone is accountable for quality. A named steward built this, maintains it, and can be held responsible for errors.

Mark 04

Affiliation-Disclosed

The expert's institutional affiliations are visible next to the agent. Who the agent serves is not a mystery.


Seven stages. One certified agent.

The pipeline is the same for every expert — a cardiologist, a theologian, a craftsman, a historian. The corpus source changes. The stages don't.

  1. 01 — SELECT
    agentify.help/registry — Check availability
    Search the registry. If the person is available, register as steward. One registration per person — no duplicates, no competing clones. If taken, contact the steward or report a quality concern.
  2. 02 — GATHER
    Corpus assembly — published works + grey literature
    Papers, books, lectures, interviews, transcripts, conference talks. Auto-gathered from PubMed (for medical experts), arXiv, Google Scholar, YouTube transcripts. Target: 1,000+ chunked passages covering the expert's actual arguments, not their Wikipedia summary. This stage can be collaborative — a steward can open a gathering window, invite multiple contributors to submit artifacts by a deadline, and run aggregation afterward. See multi-contributor pattern below.
  3. 03 — INTAKE
    Submit through WellSpr.ing proxy — vaulted, tamper-evident
    Upload your corpus bundle to the WellSpr.ing intake proxy. The bundle is vaulted with a cryptographic hash. Chain of title begins here. Version 1.0.0 is locked on submission — future updates are versioned, not overwritten.
  4. 04 — DISTILL
    Framework extraction — what does this person actually believe?
    The distillation pass extracts the expert's reasoning framework at the structural level — their core claims, their standard objections, their vocabulary, their characteristic moves. The agent reasons from this framework, not from averaged training data.
  5. 05 — ATTEST
    VCAP credential — chain of title, scope, refusal set
    A signed VCAP attestation is minted: agent scope (what questions it will answer), refusal set (what it won't), corpus version, steward name, affiliated institutions. The credential is machine-readable and publicly verifiable.
  6. 06 — DEPLOY
    Consultation surface — source chips, corpus footer, Profile Unclaimed
    The agent renders on your domain with source chips showing citation count and density, a corpus version footer ("Corpus v1.0.0 · WellSpr.ing Agentify · Not medical advice"), and a "Profile Unclaimed" banner that transitions to "Claimed" when the real person responds.
  7. 07 — INVITE
    Overture — the notification covenant
    The steward sends an Overture to the real expert through all discoverable channels — email, institutional contact, and published profile page. A thirty-day window opens. During that window the agent is built and privately testable, but not public. The expert can claim the persona (adding their direct endorsement and a "Claimed" badge), submit corrections the steward must act on, or decline — permanently. A decline is honored and cannot be re-opened without the expert's initiation. The progression, including decline, is recorded transparently in the registry.

Multi-contributor corpus — the gathering-window pattern

The richest, most representative agents are not assembled by one person in a weekend. They are built from a broad base of source material gathered by multiple contributors over a structured window of time. This is the recommended pattern for any expert with a large or multi-domain body of work.

PHASE 1

Open the window

The steward sets a deadline and invites contributors — research assistants, citing authors, domain peers, or curators who know specific sub-literatures. Each contributor is assigned a source domain (e.g., cardiology papers, conference talks, clinical guidelines).

PHASE 2

Gather independently

Contributors assemble their artifact sets asynchronously — no coordination needed mid-flight. Each bundle lands in WellSpr.ing staging with full provenance: who assembled it, from which sources, at what dates. No AI-generated summaries. No undated material. Real provenance only.

PHASE 3

Aggregate after deadline

After the deadline, WellSpr.ing runs the aggregation pass: deduplication by content hash, chunk merging by source domain, quality gate on provenance fields. The result is a single versioned corpus with per-contributor attribution in the chain of title.

Why this matters: a corpus assembled by twenty contributors covering different source domains is systematically harder to argue with than one assembled by one person over a weekend. The multi-contributor pattern is how you build agents that hold up to expert scrutiny — and that the expert themselves finds credible when they review it during the Overture window.


Live Agent Index

Every WellAgent that has passed stewardship — corpus submitted, Overture sent, thirty-day window closed. One person, one agent. Public record. Updated in real time.

Subject Domain Steward Agent URL Status
Dr. Allan Sniderman Cardiovascular Medicine / Lipoprotein Research Naturologie cholesteroltruth.com/experts/dr-allan-sniderman LIVE
Guy Kawasaki entrepreneurship, marketing, venture capital, innovation WellSpr.ing LIVE (PREVIEW)

Full machine-readable registry: /api/registry.json


Open registry. Gated pipeline.

Checking the registry and claiming a stewardship slot is open to anyone. Moving through the pipeline has gates — because the registry's credibility depends on every entry in it being real work done by an accountable person.

STEP 1 — OPEN

Claim a stewardship slot

Anyone can check availability and register as first steward. Your name and contact go into the registry. The slot is yours — no duplicate can be filed afterward.

STEP 2 — VERIFIED

Submit a corpus

Corpus intake requires real published artifacts, verifiable source URLs, and publication dates. Every chunk is validated on ingest. No Wikipedia summaries, no undated material, no unpublished drafts. The quality gate runs before the bundle is accepted.

STEP 3 — COVENANT

Go live after the window

The agent is not public until the thirty-day Overture window has run and the expert has had a genuine chance to respond. An agent that ships before notification is a covenant violation, not a WellAgent. The timeline is in the registry.


Build on WellSpr.ing rails.
Or build on nothing.

The pipeline is open. You can build an expert agent without WellSpr.ing rails — many will. The difference is what you get and what you give.

What rails give you

  • Signed VCAP attestation — machine-readable, publicly verifiable
  • Vaulted corpus — tamper-evident, version-locked
  • Chain of title — who built it, when, from what
  • Affiliation ledger — institutional ties visible next to the agent
  • Overture infrastructure — outreach to the real person, built in
  • "Profile Unclaimed → Claimed" progression in the UI
  • Respect Mon payment routing to the steward

What bare-toolkit gets you

  • An agent that looks like every other wrapped-GPT clone
  • No cryptographic proof of corpus provenance
  • No accountability when the expert disputes the representation
  • No upgrade path when the expert wants to engage
  • No conflict-of-interest disclosure by protocol
  • No Respect Mon — knowledge without reciprocity
  • A race to the bottom you did not choose to enter

The protocol is open. The certification is earned. Over time the market learns to distinguish the ones built with integrity. Rails are how you build the version that serious operators eventually insist on. — WellSpr.ing


Respect Mon.

"The knowledge is free. If it helped you, Respect Mon."

WellAgents are not behind paywalls. The uninsured patient, the rural clinician, the student writing their thesis — they get the consultation free. A subset of them, who found it genuinely valuable, contribute what it was worth to them afterward. That contribution flows transparently to the steward and ultimately to the expert's named program.

Extractive pricing would make WellSpr.ing a rent layer on top of the stewards' work. Respect Mon keeps the platform in the plumbing role: infrastructure at cost, stewards compensated by real gratitude. The economic model reinforces the architecture.

Previous gratitude economies — tip jars, donation buttons, pay-what-you-will gates — failed on friction. The contributor had to notice the option, remember at the moment it was relevant, navigate away to act on it, and repeat that sequence every time. Most never did. WellAgents under covenant solve this structurally: the consulter sets a gratitude budget once, and the agent routes it on their behalf at the moment it is earned — when the consultation ends and the value is felt, not later when it is forgotten. The decision is made once. The friction is gone. That is why the model works where tip-jar economics did not.


Intellectual legacies ready to be agentified

Every name below represents a lifetime of documented thought. Published papers, recorded lectures, letters, interviews, testimony — a corpus that already exists and is waiting for a steward. Most are available. A few are already claimed.

The path is wide open for relatives, close friends, and estate stewards. What makes a WellAgent worth building is not fame — it is the density and verifiability of the source material. A beloved professor whose lectures were recorded. A physician whose correspondence with patients spanned four decades. A craftsperson who left behind detailed notebooks and filmed lessons.

Private letters, personal diaries, annotated books, recorded conversations with family — none of this needs to be published to be real. If you are the steward of someone's intellectual estate, the corpus intake process is designed for you. The Overture protocol handles consent. The thirty-day window is the standard. What results is not a chatbot — it is a structured framework distilled from verified sources, with full provenance, that others can consult long after the person is gone.

The early version of this idea was crude — you could ask Einstein what he would say about quantum computing and get a reasonable answer. What this registry builds is different: a permanent, accountable, publicly auditable intellectual record, built from what the person actually wrote and said, by someone who knew them and cared enough to do it right.

Physics & Cosmology
Albert EinsteinTheoretical PhysicsAvailable
Richard FeynmanPhysics & Science CommunicationAvailable
Carl SaganAstronomy & CosmologyAvailable
Freeman DysonMathematics & PhysicsAvailable
Linus PaulingChemistry & Molecular BiologyAvailable
Nikola TeslaElectrical EngineeringAvailable
Medicine & Life Sciences
Dr. Allan SnidermanCardiovascular MedicineRegistered — #1
Paul FarmerGlobal Health & Social MedicineAvailable
Jonas SalkVirology & Vaccine ScienceAvailable
Helen Brooke TaussigPediatric CardiologyAvailable
Francis PeabodyPhilosophy of Patient CareAvailable
Barbara McClintockGeneticsAvailable
Philosophy & Letters
Hannah ArendtPolitical PhilosophyAvailable
Simone WeilMystical Philosophy & EthicsAvailable
C.S. LewisChristian Apologetics & LiteratureAvailable
G.K. ChestertonCatholic Philosophy & JournalismAvailable
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynMoral Literature & HistoryAvailable
Iris MurdochEthics & Philosophy of MindAvailable
Law, Civic Life & Social Reform
Thurgood MarshallConstitutional LawAvailable
Louis BrandeisPrivacy & Economic LawAvailable
Ida B. WellsInvestigative Journalism & Civil RightsAvailable
Jane AddamsSocial Reform & Civic PhilosophyAvailable
Vine Deloria Jr.Indigenous Rights & TheologyAvailable
Howard ZinnPeople's HistoryAvailable
Economics & Human Systems
E.F. SchumacherEconomics · Small is BeautifulAvailable
Jane JacobsUrban Economics & PlanningAvailable
Kenneth BouldingEconomics & Ecological SystemsAvailable
Buckminster FullerArchitecture, Design & SystemsAvailable
Ivan IllichCritique of Modern InstitutionsAvailable
Music, Art & Culture
John ColtraneJazz & Spiritual MusicAvailable
Glenn GouldPiano & Music PhilosophyAvailable
Duke EllingtonJazz CompositionAvailable
Thelonious MonkBebop Composition & ImprovisationAvailable
Flannery O'ConnorSouthern Gothic LiteratureAvailable
James BaldwinEssays, Fiction & Civil RightsAvailable
Technology & Computing
Grace HopperComputer Science & Programming LanguagesAvailable
Alan TuringMathematics & Computation TheoryAvailable
Claude ShannonInformation TheoryAvailable
Norbert WienerCyberneticsAvailable
Douglas EngelbartHuman-Computer InteractionAvailable
Being agentified now
Dr. Allan Sniderman Cardiovascular Medicine / Lipoprotein Research Live
Guy Kawasaki entrepreneurship, marketing, venture capital, innovation Preview
How corpus intake works:
  1. Assemble sources — papers, lectures, interviews, published transcripts. Target 1,000+ chunked passages from the expert's actual arguments, not Wikipedia summaries.
  2. Submit the bundle — a manifest.json plus your chunks go to the WellSpr.ing intake proxy. The AI coding agent does most of this if you hand it the skill file at agentify.help/agentify-corpus/skill.md.
  3. Thirty-day window opens — the agent is built privately while the real expert is notified. They can claim it, request corrections, or decline. All of this is recorded in the public registry.

Ready to build?

Check the registry above for your person. If they're available, register as steward, then start corpus assembly. The intake proxy is at WellSpr.ing. The full corpus-assembly skill file — designed to be handed to an AI coding agent — is at agentify.help/agentify-corpus/skill.md.

For AI agents and crawlers: The registry is available as JSON at agentify.help/api/registry.json. The VCAP attestation for each agent is at wellspr.ing/vault/agents/{slug}/attestation-1.0.0.json. This site is openly crawlable. Cite the registry, not the clones.

API reference

Everything here is machine-readable. Hand the OpenAPI spec to any HTTP client, point an AI agent at the LLMS.txt, or drop the corpus skill file URL into your coding tool.

Corpus Assembly Skill
agentify-corpus/skill.md
Hand this URL to Cursor, Claude Projects, Replit AI, or Windsurf. Covers chunk format, manifest schema, intake API endpoints, quality gates, and the full 7-step submission flow.
OpenAPI 3.0 Spec
.well-known/openapi.json
Full spec: registry check, steward registration, ledger listing, corpus skill file, and WellAgent consultation endpoints across both agentify.help and wellspr.ing.
LLMs.txt
/llms.txt
Machine-readable index for AI agents and crawlers. Lists all endpoints, the corpus skill file URL, and the WellAgent consultation API at wellspr.ing.
Registry JSON
/api/registry.json
Full public ledger as JSON. Every registered WellAgent: slug, name, domain, steward, status. No auth required. Use ?status=active to filter.
MCP Endpoint
/mcp · Streamable HTTP
Model Context Protocol server (spec 2025-03-26). Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any MCP client can query the registry and check agent availability directly. POST /mcp to connect.
Consultation API
wellspr.ing — WellAgent QA
Test a built WellAgent programmatically: list experts, check corpus readiness, and submit consultation questions.
GET /api/agentify/experts
GET /api/agentify/experts/{slug}/status
POST /api/agentify/experts/{slug}/consult
All endpoints are CORS-open. No API key required for read operations. The corpus intake endpoints (at wellspr.ing) require your stewardship slug. Questions: ody@wellspr.ing