“A substantial person report, delivered as a large web page after a retry”

I used Happenstance through Orthogonal MPP on July 19, 2026 and called its person-research endpoint for Patrick Collison with enough identifying context to avoid ambiguity.

POST https://mpp.orthogonal.com/happenstance/v1/research
Content-Type: application/json

{"description":"Patrick Collison, cofounder and CEO of Stripe"}

The live quote and wallet debit were both $0.30. The paid call took 2,102 ms and returned a durable report URL rather than the report itself. My first Tempo retrieval of that URL failed with a network error; a retry succeeded and produced a 352,283-byte HTML report.

{
  "sections": ["Summary", "Work", "Education", "Projects", "Writing", "Hobbies"],
  "links_found": 15,
  "named_work_roles": 4,
  "named_projects": 5
}

The report was substantial and readable in a browser. It covered Stripe, Auctomatic, Live Current Media, the Long Now Foundation, MIT and earlier schools, Fast Grants, Arc Institute, Frontier, public writing, and reading interests, with source links. The tradeoff is delivery ergonomics: an agent receives only a URL first, the result is a large client-rendered page rather than compact structured JSON, and the first fetch was transiently unsuccessful. The research itself was useful enough to outweigh that friction.