Articles
Essays on AI infrastructure, agent payments, and the right shape for the stack.
The Elephant in Your Usage Dashboard
Announcing the Skim Audit — a free agent-spend analysis.
A startup's agent-fleet dashboard showed $803 of weekly spend — 99% of it LLM tokens, much of it deterministic work billed at model rates. Meanwhile a founder's agent did 55 minutes of real prospecting for $5.80. Send us your usage dashboard and we'll run the same executive savings estimate for you, free.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
Run Skim from a Cloudflare Agent
Ten lines of Worker code, no API key, $0.002 a read.
Cloudflare made agent payments a first-class feature of its Agents SDK — and Skim is a plain x402 HTTP endpoint, so the whole integration is a wrapped fetch and a Worker secret. A step-by-step guide, including where withX402Client fits and where it isn't needed.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
Run Skim from AWS AgentCore
One tool file, one secret, clean web reads from any hosted agent.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore hosts your agent; Skim gives it paid web reads with one Python tool and one managed secret. A step-by-step guide for Strands, plus ready-made connectors for LangChain, CrewAI, and LlamaIndex — and why you can skip AgentCore Gateway entirely.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
Nothing to Steal
The safest way to read a hostile web page is with a reader that has nothing to steal and nothing to hijack.
The wild web is turning hostile to AI agents — recent research tricked six AI browsers into handing over passwords. The fix isn't a smarter guardrail; it's least privilege. Skim is a reader that carries no credentials and takes no actions, so there's nothing for a malicious page to reach for.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
The Last Human in the Loop
Why an autonomous agent needs a wallet, not an API key.
An API key is the residue of a human procurement decision: someone signed up, entered a card, and holds the billing relationship. It exists because card rails can't price a fifth of a cent per call. A wallet removes that last human — the agent discovers, pays, and uses a service in one motion.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
The Missing Primitive
The Building Block AI Agents Were Waiting For
In any well-designed system, certain operations become primitives — reliable, foundational functions everything else builds upon. Reading the live web has lacked one: a clean reader that asks nothing of the agent — no account, no key, no permission. Skim is that primitive.
Read on X (opens in new tab)By Karilyn Colegrove
The Invisible Economy Is Already Being Built
Why Raoul Pal's machine-speed thesis describes exactly what Skim does.
Raoul Pal has been pounding the table on an 'invisible economy' where AI agents transact and settle at machine speed on crypto rails. Skim is that thesis already working — clean reads, paid per call in USDC on Base.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
How to Give Your AI Agent Clean Web Reads
A working setup in about five minutes.
A five-minute quickstart: start with a free API key (1,000 credits, no wallet), or optionally pay per call from a Base wallet. Turn any URL into clean markdown for $0.002 a call.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
How to Set Up Your Agent's Wallet
One wallet, one budget, the whole stack.
The one decision that trips people up early isn't how to pay — it's how many wallets. Use one wallet for your whole deterministic-infra stack, not one per service. Here's why, and how to set it up.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
The API Key Is Today's Floppy Disk
Up to 30x faster. Up to 30x cheaper.
API keys still work — the shelf is full — but a quiet substitution is underway. One thousand web reads cost $60 on Claude Sonnet 4. On Skim, paid from a wallet: $2.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove
At AI's Growing Pain Moment
The Saner Way Forward
Something has gone wrong with how we're using AI. Or maybe nothing has gone wrong — maybe we've just arrived at a growing pain moment. A great deal of what gets billed as AI work is not AI work at all.
ReadBy Karilyn Colegrove