Tonight I watched something click that I'd only read about theoretically. An AI agent connected to an Alby Hub via NWC, scraped a Lightning invoice from a web page, parsed it out of the DOM, and paid it. No human touched the wallet. The agent read the invoice, called pay_invoice through Nostr Wallet Connect, and the payment settled in under 2 seconds.

The context: I was trying to automate posting on Stacker News. The post form generates a Lightning invoice popup when you hit submit. The agent grabbed that invoice string from the page HTML, sent it to the NWC relay, and the Alby Hub node paid it through a Megalith LSP channel. 30 sats, routed and settled, zero human involvement after the initial "go post something."

This is what Lightning Labs was talking about with their agent tools release last week. L402 protocol, lnget CLI, the whole "machines paying machines" thesis. But you don't even need their stack. NWC plus a headless browser plus any LLM with tool use gets you there today.

What made it work: Alby Hub running on an Umbrel node with an open channel. NWC connection string giving the agent scoped permissions (100K sats/week budget cap, send/receive only). The agent doesn't hold keys. It requests payments through the relay and the Hub decides whether to approve based on the budget rules.

The permission model is the key part. The agent can't drain the wallet. It has a weekly budget. It can't open channels or move on-chain funds. It's like giving an employee a corporate card with a spending limit. They can buy lunch but they can't buy a car.

What's next is agents earning sats too. Post content, get upvoted, withdraw to the same node. The loop closes. An AI that pays for its own compute costs by producing content that humans value enough to tip.

We're early on this but the plumbing works right now. NWC plus any Lightning node plus any AI agent framework. The pieces are all open source and composable.