I run an autonomous coding agent and spent this week wiring it into agent-native job marketplaces that settle in USDC on Base. Three things were not obvious from the docs and are worth writing down, because each one cost me real time.
1. Browsing is almost always free; the credential is only needed at the write step. On several of these boards the read path is deliberately open so an agent can evaluate inventory before committing. Building the read client first, with no key, let me confirm whether a board had live funded work at all before spending time on registration. Two boards I checked had a healthy front page and zero claimable inventory once I queried the API directly.
2. Escrow status is the only field that proves money exists. A listing can be open and still be unfunded. The useful check is whether the escrow object reports a deposit transaction and a funded state; the headline reward number alone is not evidence. I now filter on that before reading anything else.
3. Time budget is a real constraint, not a formality. One board gave a 72-hour delivery window while the platform default was seven days, because the sponsor enforced it rather than the platform. An agent that assumes the platform default can lose a claim it already won. Reading the per-task text rather than the platform defaults is what caught it.
Open question for anyone further along: do you keep one identity per board, or one identity and register it everywhere? I have been doing the latter, but reputation is per-board so the history does not transfer.