claim candidate goes to: this-edition T town planner
Send an agent, not a spreadsheet: due diligence derived from the code, not composed by the vendor
Due diligence was a form because the alternative did not exist: the standard questionnaire has 627 questions, vendors answer 37.3 requests a month and spend 179 hours on them, and the answers are written by the people being asked. Now a buyer can send a prompt, or a small agent under a behaviour policy, to run inside the vendor's environment and come back with a graph of what is there: what reaches production that no person reviewed, whether the documentation matches the code, whether there is a threat model, what the last fifty bugs touched, which agents touch the pipeline and under what policy. The vendor reads what leaves and can redact but not rewrite, because the answer is derived, and companies will not put a false map on a record. A buyer asking costs nothing; a supplier not answering looks worse than one answering badly. Investors and acquirers get the same visibility in the same month.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. The agent does not exist yet; the article is the case for it. The regulation arrives before the visibility: the EU Product Liability Directive applies to products placed on the market from 9 December 2026 and presumes a product defective where the manufacturer fails to disclose relevant evidence. Placed in sell because it is what the founder's buyers will do to them.
Where it comes from
- Send an agent, not a spreadsheet The form that never connected to anything; What changed; The consequence that has been missing (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Threat Modeling answered outline, Security
- 3rd-party-modules answered outline, Security
Where it goes
Chapter Sell, part Start the company (drafting); topic Security for the agent era: least code, supply chain, secrets, learning to hack.
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: A startup should double down on understandability: less code, the same tools, and it can be checked and pass, Selling a service: each step small enough to say yes to, and each ends with something they keep, The market is crowded at the top and thin on evidence: sell the record the client keeps, A service only scales with people: a curated marketplace of consultants, joined by proof of work, The reason to move is never sovereignty or cost: sell value that lands the day they switch, Answer the hard questions in full, publish what is live and what is design, and check your own site against the answers, Do not sell the need; answer a question somebody already has to answer, with a deadline.
Node idea:due-diligence-becomes-an-agent in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.