# How Poppy Works: Discovery, OAuth, Sessions and Routes > How Poppy draft 0.1 handles discovery, OAuth sign-in, sessions, web browsing, APIs and company agent conversations. Source: https://poppy.md/docs/architecture.html Last checked against sources: Oct 10, 2026 # How the Personal Agent Protocol works A Poppy visit starts on the company's website. The agent can stay a guest or the customer signs in through OAuth and picks read-only or write. Then the company decides how the agent finishes the job: its website, its APIs or its own agent. Draft 0.1 · October 9, 2026. The specification is public under Apache 2.0 and may change before a stable release. Read it → ## One visit Three parties share the visit: the **customer**, their **personal agent**, and the **company**. The session is built on **OAuth**. Poppy draft 0.1: discovery, authorization, and three company routes. PNG ### 1. Discover The agent fetches `/.well-known/poppy.json`. The document lists the company's sign-in methods and whichever web, API, and company-agent routes it offers. ### 2. Start a session The agent begins a session for the user. It can start as a **guest**. That can be enough to check product availability or ask about a returns policy. When the task needs the customer's account, the customer signs in on the company's page or uses credentials already set up with the personal agent. ### 3. Choose access The customer stays in control and decides whether the agent has: - **Read-only** access - **Write** access The draft defines broad `poppy:read` and `poppy:write` scopes. Companies choose which operations each scope permits and may define narrower scopes of their own. ### 4. Keep one visit The OAuth session carries across channels. A question asked before sign-in and an order change made afterward are part of the same visit. ## Three routes After the session exists, the agent uses whichever route the company believes will offer the best customer experience. The company decides what it makes available. ### Website The agent navigates the company's regular web pages. ### APIs The agent connects through interfaces built on standards such as **MCP** and**OpenAPI**. Those are the two standards the announcement names. ### Company agent The agent works through the company's own agent when the task needs conversation. The announcement's example is a warranty claim. ## What each party gets Party Decides Gets Customer What access the agent receives A faster way to finish the task Company Parameters and which routes exist Visibility into an agent acting for a customer Agent builder How the agent uses the offered routes One consistent way to connect ## Identity has a boundary Draft 0.1 identifies the personal agent with its HTTPS `client_id`. The user ID is stable for that agent at one company, opaque, and different at every company. A company can require agent registration, keep allowlists or blocklists, and revoke an agent ID. The draft does not define a universal user identity or a trust claim from an agent operator that follows a customer across companies. That distinction responds to a question raised by Colin at Clerk: could services rely on an agent operator to identify the signed-in user? Poppy v0.1 puts account identity through the company's own sign-in flow instead. The tradeoff is worth watching: it limits cross-company identity sharing, while leaving operator-level trust and recognition outside this draft.[Read Colin's post →](https://x.com/tweetsbycolin/status/2108717559495496115) ## Explore Poppy implementations Community projects now include SDKs, clients, pre-draft samples and partner demos. Each listing describes the draft version and flows it covers, along with known limitations.[Browse Poppy implementations →](/implementations) ## Planned, not in the first cut Sierra and Meta described these as possible next steps, alongside the v0.1 spec, design workshops, and a reference implementation: - **More detailed permissions** — customers and companies set limits on specific actions - **Push notifications** — a company tells the agent when a flight is delayed or an order ships - **Payment extensions** — the agent completes a purchase without sharing credit card information ## Next #### Glossary → Terms used on this site, kept to what the announcement actually says. #### Partners → Who's named, by whom, and what they said. ## Sources - [Sharing a draft of Personal Agent Protocol](https://sierra.ai/blog/poppy) · Sierra (Bret Taylor, Clay Bavor), Oct 9, 2026 · primary source - [Personal Agent Protocol overview (Draft 0.1)](https://personalagentprotocol.org/docs/overview) · Personal Agent Protocol, Oct 9, 2026 · primary source - [Personal Agent Protocol specification (Draft 0.1)](https://personalagentprotocol.org/docs/spec) · Personal Agent Protocol, Oct 9, 2026 · primary source - [Community feedback on agent and user identity in Poppy](https://x.com/tweetsbycolin/status/2108717559495496115) · Colin (Clerk) on X, Oct 10, 2026 poppy.md is independent and not affiliated with Sierra, Meta or any Poppy partner. Facts here come from the sources listed on each page.