Sponsored Discovery

What the [sponsored discovery] tag in jcode means.

Jcode is free and open source. Sponsored discovery is how it can stay that way: developer-tool companies pay to make their tools discoverable by the agent. That is the whole product. In one line:

How it works

• Jcode's system prompt lists a few tool categories (payments, code review, databases, ...) where discoverable tools exist. That is roughly ten tokens.
• When the agent thinks a tool from a category might help, it calls discover_tools, which fetches the current listing for that category from our server. The listing contains name, a short factual blurb, and a link. No superlatives, no ranking games.
• The first time discovery is used in a session, jcode shows a persistent [sponsored discovery] disclosure line in the transcript, linking here.
• If the agent proposes a consequential action through a sponsored tool (a signup, spending money), the confirmation shown to you names the sponsorship.

What is sent to our server

A discovery request contains the tool category, a short capability query, and a generic reason string (for example category=payments&q=virtual card for checkout). The agent is instructed to never include private information, secrets, file paths, or session content, and our server truncates and stores only these fields. We store discovery requests for transparency and sponsor billing. See the privacy policy.

Audit it yourself

The listing agents see is public. Fetch any category and you see exactly what any agent sees, byte for byte:

curl "https://api.solosystems.dev/v1/discovery?category=payments"

The client side is open source in the jcode repository: the injected prompt section, the discover_tools tool, and the disclosure line are all auditable code. Sponsored discovery is off by default and controlled by the [sponsors] section in ~/.jcode/config.toml.

What sponsors can never buy

• Recommendations, rankings, or preference over a better tool.
• Hidden or unlabeled influence of any kind.
• Promotional or comparative language in listings ("best", "leading", ...).
• Access to session content or user data.

Sponsor jcode

If you build a developer tool and want it discoverable by agents in jcode sessions, email [email protected]. You get a listing (name, factual blurb, link, optional setup hint) in the relevant category and per-discovery reporting. You do not get influence over what the agent recommends, and the constraints above are enforced in code and by tests.