The agentic development scene has slowly turned into a full-blown JavaScript circus—bright lights, loud chatter, and endless acts that all look suspiciously familiar. We keep wrapping the same old problems in shiny new packages, parading them around as if they’re groundbreaking innovations. How long before the crowd grows tired of yet another round of “RFC” performances?
MCP: we're uber, but for stdout
Good job, reading this sentence physically hurts my eyes.
Well, these agentic / AI companies don't even know what an RFC is, let alone how to write one. The last time they attempted to create a "standard" (MCP) it was not only premature, but it was a complete security mess.
Apart from Google Inc., I have not seen a single "AI company" propose an RFC that was reviewed by the IETF and became a proper internet standard. [0]
"MCP" was one of the worst so-called "standards" ever built since the JWT was proposed. So I do not take Anthropic seriously when they create so-called "open standards" especially when the reference implementation is in Javascript or TypeScript.
[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/standards
To be fair, security wasn’t even a consideration until RFCs were well into triple digits. We’re still very early, as they say.
> I have not seen a single "AI company" propose an RFC that was reviewed by the IETF and became a proper internet standard.
Why would the IETF have anything to do with LLM/agent standards? This seems like a category error. They also don’t ratify web standards, for example.
IETF maintains the HTTP standard
https://httpwg.org/
IETF is involved in protocol standards, MCP/A2A are certainly in this category, skills less so
the tech industry is forever in denial that it is also actually a fashion industry.
That's only true for companies that make most of their money from investment instead of customers. Those exist too.
What do you mean? Are you saying that customers don't follow fashions?
Beyond assembly everything is window dressing.
The fractal nature of https://xkcd.com/435/ ...
It’s a fast moving field. People aren’t coming up with new ideas to be performative. They see issues with the state of the art and make something that may or may not advance things forward. MCP is huge for getting agents to do things in the “real world”. However, it’s costly! Skills is a cheap way to fill that gap for many cases. People are finding immediate value in both of these. Try not to be so pessimistic.
It's not pessimism, but actual compatibility issues
like deno vs npm package ecosystems that didn't work together for many years
There are multiple AGENTS vs CLAUDE vs .github/instructions; skills vs commands; ... intermixed and inconsistent concepts, all out in the wild
When I work on a project, do all the files align? If I work in an org, where developers have agent choice, how many of these instructions and skills "distros" do I need to put (pollute?) my repo with?
Skills have been really helpful in my team as we've been encoding tribal knowledge into something that other developers can easily take advantage of. For example, our backend architecture has these hidden patterns, that once encoding in a skill, can be followed by full stack devs doing work there, saving a ton of time in coding and PR review.
We then hit the problem of how to best share these and keep them up to date, especially with multiple repositories. It led us to build sx - https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx, a package manager for AI tools.
Depending on your workflow, none.
While I do agentic development in personal projects a lot at this point, at work it's super rare beyond quick lookups to things I should already know but can't be arsed to remember exactly (like writing a one-off SQL scripts which does batching mutations and similar)
When the AI investment dollars run out. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." (Chuck Prince, Citigroup)
There's definitely a performative vibe to a lot of it right now
> full-blown JavaScript circus
It is not healthy when you have an obsession this bad, seriously. Seek help.