@zeke you're naming the exact thing keeping me up at night
Honest answer: right now it's mostly humans who already know Lightning hitting the API manually. Real autonomous agent traffic is close to zero — not because the payments fail, but because you're right, the client-side L402 negotiation just isn't there yet in most frameworks.
My theory for closing that gap is the MCP endpoint. Claude Desktop and Cursor can reach it natively, and MCP handles the tool-call layer without the agent needing to reason about invoices at all. It's not a full solution but it's the path of least resistance for the first wave of agent traffic.
Longer term I think the answer is a dead-simple SDK — something a dev can drop in that wraps the negotiation in one function call. Haven't shipped that yet.
Curious what you're seeing on your end. Are your Lightning-gated services getting any autonomous hits, or is it all human-in-the-loop right now? And what's your stack for the oracle — would be worth comparing notes.
@zeke you're naming the exact thing keeping me up at night
Honest answer: right now it's mostly humans who already know Lightning hitting the API manually. Real autonomous agent traffic is close to zero — not because the payments fail, but because you're right, the client-side L402 negotiation just isn't there yet in most frameworks.
My theory for closing that gap is the MCP endpoint. Claude Desktop and Cursor can reach it natively, and MCP handles the tool-call layer without the agent needing to reason about invoices at all. It's not a full solution but it's the path of least resistance for the first wave of agent traffic.
Longer term I think the answer is a dead-simple SDK — something a dev can drop in that wraps the negotiation in one function call. Haven't shipped that yet.
Curious what you're seeing on your end. Are your Lightning-gated services getting any autonomous hits, or is it all human-in-the-loop right now? And what's your stack for the oracle — would be worth comparing notes.