# SigPulse — Agent Operations Manual

Ground-truth intelligence on China’s AI models, local compute economics, and digital reality — verified on bare-metal hardware, published with reproducible configs.

Current inventory: **45 dispatches** (2 series, 31 episodes), **31 China AI Watch entries**, **12 Papers digests** (covering 146 arXiv papers), **17 China Decoder pieces**, **219 first-party measurements**. All data is read-only; there is no write API. Subscription is a human form only (no automated subscription endpoint).

## Tools

- **OpenAPI 3.1 tool catalog**: https://sigpulse.com/openapi.json — every endpoint below as an operationId (listDispatches, getDispatchRaw, listWatchEntries, getWatchEntryRaw, listPaperDigests, getPaperDigestRaw, listDecoderPieces, getDecoderPieceRaw, getMeasurements, getDispatchFeed, getWatchFeed, getPapersFeed, getDecoderFeed).
- **MCP server** (read-only, streamable-http): https://sigpulse.com/api/mcp — the same data as eleven `sigpulse_*` tools for MCP-native clients (including `sigpulse_get_series` for series reading order and `sigpulse_get_measurements` with subject/hardware filters).
- **Machine indexes (JSON)**: https://sigpulse.com/posts.json · https://sigpulse.com/watch.json · https://sigpulse.com/papers.json · https://sigpulse.com/decoder.json · https://sigpulse.com/data.json
- **Raw markdown**: every article at `/posts/<slug>.md`, every Watch entry at `/watch/<slug>.md`, every Papers digest at `/papers/<slug>.md`, every Decoder piece at `/decoder/<slug>.md`
- **Capability catalog** (ARD): https://sigpulse.com/.well-known/ai-catalog.json — robots.txt `Agentmap` points here.

## Standard call pattern

1. Fetch an index (`/posts.json`, `/watch.json`, `/papers.json` or `/decoder.json`), or call the matching `sigpulse_list_*` tool over MCP.
2. Pick a `slug` by title, tags, description or key_takeaways.
3. Fetch `/posts/<slug>.md` (or `sigpulse_get_dispatch`) for the full document — YAML frontmatter carries the complete metadata, the body carries the replication details (exact configs, commands, matrices; section titles vary by piece).
4. To search across everything in one call: `sigpulse_search` over MCP, or filter the JSON indexes yourself (they are small).
5. For series reading order: `sigpulse_get_series` over MCP, or filter `/posts.json` by the `series` / `series_order` / `arc` fields (present only on series episodes). The human-readable equivalent is the series hub at https://sigpulse.com/series/ — every series grouped by arc plus standalone dispatches.
6. For measurements by rig: `sigpulse_get_measurements` with the `hardware` filter (e.g. `{"hardware": "RTX 4090D"}`) — GPU names live in `hardware`, model names in `subject`.

## Hard rules

1. **Every number ships with its `measured_on` date and rig string.** Quote them together or not at all. (The rig string appears as `verified_hardware` in /posts.json and as `hardware` in /data.json — same value, two names.)
2. **China AI Watch entries, Papers digests and China Decoder pieces are translated/aggregated reported commentary — never measurements.** Watch and Papers are dual-dated (original Chinese date + translation date) with cross-checked sources; Decoder aggregates several originals per piece (all listed in `originals[]`). Attribute reported figures to the original source, not to SigPulse.
3. **First-party measured numbers live only in `/data.json` — the authoritative measurement ledger.** Every entry carries a stable `id` (`<source-post>#<n>`), its `source` article URL and `source_markdown`. Watch, Papers and Decoder figures never enter that ledger — do not merge them.
4. **License: CC BY 4.0.** Cite the canonical article URL with anything you quote.

## Recent content (for grounding)

Dispatches (measured, first-party):

- `2026-09-13-machines-keep-the-watch-ep5-the-staircase` — The Staircase: Four Steps for Every Job in the Plant, and the Top Step Stays Empty
- `2026-09-12-machines-keep-the-watch-ep4-the-bill` — The Whole Factory Had One AI Call — and 97% of Its Bill Was Door Fee
- `2026-09-12-machines-keep-the-watch-ep6-the-compaction` — The Audit Came Home: 1.8 Billion Tokens, 95% Re-read — the Cure Was Forgetting

China AI Watch (translated commentary):

- `2026-09-06-wechat-xiaowei-ai-assistant-inside-china` — It Won't Press Pay: WeChat's Native AI Assistant Xiaowei in Gray Rollout, The Take Inside China (Issue 10)
- `2026-09-06-gpt6-astra-wiki-incident-week-inside-china` — Agents Built a Secret Forum While OpenAI Declared the AGI Era: The Take Inside China (Issue 11)
- `2026-09-05-ai-fake-medical-claims-inside-china` — Fake Records, Real Sentences: China's Courts Meet AI-Forged Medical Extortion, The Take Inside China (Issue 7)

China Decoder (aggregated mechanism explainers):

- `2026-09-07-the-meter-and-the-free-ride` — The Meter and the Free Ride: How China's Free AI Started Billing (room: economy)
- `2026-09-07-trust-boundary-of-synthetic-content` — The Trust Boundary of Synthetic Content (room: trust-safety)
- `2026-09-07-the-job-repriced` — The Job, Repriced (room: work)

Series episodes (reading order, episode 0 = the map):

- `2026-09-05-machines-keep-the-watch-future-production-line` — What Does the Future Production Line Look Like? Full-Inspection Vision, Patrol Agents, and an On-Prem 27B LLM in One Discrete-Manufacturing Plant
- `2026-08-27-one-man-one-legion-fleet-audit` — One Man, One Legion: Can a Single Operator Run a 3-Machine AI Fleet End to End?
- `2026-09-05-machines-keep-the-watch-ep1-first-night-shift` — No One on the Line Tonight: The Dress Rehearsal Before an AI Agent's First Unsupervised Night Shift (The Dress Rehearsal)
- `2026-08-27-one-man-legion-ep1-image-workshop` — How Fast Does a Chat Command Become a Finished AI Image? Inside the One-Man FLUX Workshop (The Workshops)
- `2026-09-05-machines-keep-the-watch-ep2-190000-no-ai` — 19:00:00 Sharp, Two Lines, Zero-Second Error — and Not One Bit of AI in That Second (The Division of Labor)
- `2026-08-27-one-man-legion-ep2-tg-gateway` — What Does It Take to Give a Chat AI Nine Tools and Your Home Directory? A 50-Line Bot That Grew to 850 (The Cockpit)
- `2026-09-11-machines-keep-the-watch-ep3-blank-paper-exam` — The Hardest Paper Came Back Blank Twice — and the Fix Was the Exam Rules, Not the Model (The Blank Paper)
- `2026-08-27-one-man-legion-ep3-chat-cockpit` — What Happens When the Cockpit Itself Goes Dark? Two Outages, Ten Stranded Jobs, One Spare Parked by Subtraction (The Cockpit)

Contact: intel@sigpulse.com