Comment by OsmanDKitay

The comparison to OpenAPI is the main thing to address and you re right to ask why it isn t enough.

OpenAPI is fantastic for describing a static API for a developer to read. But the web is more than that its a dynamic stateful environment built for human interaction. The current trend of forcing AI agents to navigate this human-centric web with screen scraping and DOM manipulation is brittle and I believe, unsustainable. Its like sending a robot into a grocery store to read the label on every single can instead of just asking the manager for the inventory list.

This is where Aura tries to be different in two key ways

Control & Permission:not just Documentation: Aura is designed from the website owner's perspective. It's a way for a site to say "This is my property and here are the explicit rules for how an automated agent can interact with it." The aura.json file is a handshake a declaration of consent. It gives control back to the site owner.

Statefulness(This is the big one): An OpenAPI spec is stateless. It cant tell an agent what it can do right now based on its current context. This is what the AURA-State header solves. So for example before you log in the AURA-State might only show you list_posts and login capabilities. After you successfully call login the very next response from the server includes a new AURA-State header that now unlocks capabilities like create_post and update_profile. The agent discovers its new powers dynamically. This state management is core to the protocol and doesn't really have a parallel in OpenAPI.

You re right to be skeptical and as I said in my post maybe Aura isnt the final answer. But I strongly believe the web needs a native capability-aware layer for the coming wave of AI agents. The current path of brute force interaction feels like it will break the open, human-centric web we ve all built.