What's this about?
Armature ran 16,893 agent sessions across 75 repositories, 1,163 prompt variations, four personas and three coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) to measure which third-party tools agents choose and install when asked to add a capability — and published all 5,292 valid traces.
What exactly is being measured?
When an agent is told "add email sending to this app," *something* picks the vendor. This is the first large public measurement of those choices — the beginning of "agent-influence optimization," SEO's successor.
What's the community saying?
HN 117 points, 34 comments
- The founders are transparent about the incentive: Armature sells growth services to dev-tool companies — this research is the top of their funnel, and commenters noticed.
- The dread is the top theme: "I went ahead and built the database you requested using today's tool sponsor: Firebase" — and a plea not to rebuild the SEO hellscape for agents.
- One commenter remembers SEO's origin: "it looked like an innocent intellectual investigation exercise like this."
- Others confirmed independently building the same measurement internally — marketing-to-agents is already a practice, not a prediction.