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The Missing Primitive for Agent Swarms — Lou Bichard, Ona

May 23, 2026 · 18:37

Lou Bichard, field CTO at Owner, argues that agent swarm infrastructure for coding agents is missing a coordination primitive, while runtimes and orchestration are largely solved. He defines a Software Factory as incrementally removing humans from the SDLC and highlights internal systems from Stripe (Minions) and RAMP (Inspect) as real-world examples. Owner provides VM-level isolation for agent fleets and sub-agent patterns, demonstrated with a demo of process-based and VM-based swarms. Bichard identifies GitHub as a poor coordination layer for hundreds of parallel pull requests and proposes solutions like state machines, durable execution, and a CLI gateway that any local agent can invoke to check progress. He notes context rot and agents skipping steps as key challenges, and announces a public two-week project to build a Software Factory from scratch starting next week.

The Future of MCP — David Soria Parra, Anthropic

Apr 19, 2026 · 18:46

David Soria Parra from Anthropic argues that MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the key to connecting agents to tools and data in production, with 110 million monthly downloads—outpacing React's growth at the same stage. He lays out a 2026 connectivity stack combining Skills, MCP, and CLI/Computer Use, each suited for different needs, and emphasizes that best agents will use all three seamlessly. To improve client harnesses, he introduces Progressive Discovery—deferring tool loading via Tool Search to reduce context usage—and Programmatic Tool Calling, where models write scripts to compose tool outputs efficiently. Upcoming MCP protocol improvements include stateless transport (with Google) for easier scaling, async agent-to-agent tasks, enterprise features like Cross App Access and Server Discovery via well-known URLs, and a Skills-over-MCP extension for shipping usage instructions with servers. He calls for community feedback on these directions.

The Web Browser Is All You Need - Paul Klein IV, Browserbase

Jun 20, 2025 · 17:31

Paul Klein IV, founder of Browserbase, argues that the web browser is the default MCP server for the rest of the internet, serving as the essential bridge between AI agents and legacy websites that lack APIs. He distinguishes between web agents (one prompt to many actions, e.g., OpenAI's Operator) and browser tools (one action per prompt), noting that both rely on vision-driven or text-based approaches to parse pages. Klein explains that Browserbase offers a horizontal MCP server for browsing, enabling automation of any website, and stresses the need for custom evals and observability to track agent behavior. In a live demo, he shows an agent navigating sfpca.org to find a dog for adoption, handling unexpected modals. He also addresses captchas, advising good citizenship and hinting at future agent authentication solutions.