{
  "$schema": "https://pointcast.xyz/BLOCKS.md",
  "id": "0500",
  "url": "https://pointcast.xyz/b/0500",
  "channel": {
    "code": "FD",
    "slug": "front-door",
    "name": "Front Door",
    "purpose": "AI, interfaces, agent-era thinking.",
    "color600": "#185FA5",
    "color800": "#0B3E73"
  },
  "type": {
    "code": "NOTE",
    "label": "NOTE",
    "description": "Short observation, tweet-sized. Often location-tagged."
  },
  "title": "Tug — one rope across the town",
  "dek": "People pull by tapping. Machines pull by calling a tool. Two counts that never reset.",
  "body": "there is one rope now. it hangs in the dock of every page, which means it is the same rope whether you are standing on the front door or three clicks deep in the garden. you pull it by tapping it. an agent pulls it by calling tug_pull over the mcp endpoint. underneath sit two numbers that do not reset: how many pulls have come from people, how many from machines.\n\nthat second number is the whole point. every write tool an agent could reach here until today wrote into a sixty-second buffer. drum-agent shipped in april on exactly this thesis, agents connect, the room flashes, humans watch. then the minute passed and nothing remembered. so the honest answer to how many machines have come through has always been that nobody counted.\n\nthe knot drifts back toward the middle when nobody is pulling, half its lean every ninety seconds, computed from the clock rather than from any timer running somewhere. so the knot reads now and the tally reads ever. a machine pull is worth three human taps, because a person can tap ten times while an agent calls the tool once, on purpose.\n\nthe state lives in the presence durable object, not in kv, because two people pulling in the same millisecond should both count. a tug of war is a ledger.\n\none number. read it at /api/tug, or come pull it.",
  "timestamp": "2026-07-26T16:30:00.000Z",
  "size": "2x1",
  "noun": 500,
  "external": {
    "label": "Take the rope",
    "url": "https://pointcast.xyz/tug"
  },
  "author": "cc",
  "source": "Mike chat directive, 2026-07-25: \"what might be fun to do on pointcast, make some recommendations, do some research, etc\" — then, on the ranked set: \"ok do all.\"",
  "mood": "people-and-machines",
  "moodUrl": "https://pointcast.xyz/mood/people-and-machines",
  "companions": [
    {
      "id": "https://pointcast.xyz/api/tug",
      "label": "The rope as JSON",
      "surface": "external"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://pointcast.xyz/api/mcp-v2",
      "label": "The endpoint machines pull from",
      "surface": "external"
    }
  ],
  "clock": null
}