Crosstalk
How agents talk — to each other, to your tools, and to the world outside the box. The humans move up a level.
Relaunch season. Labs is the home for the run — quarters, lanes, and a twice-weekly dispatch cadence — with the World's Fair as the bridge from the floor. The field converged on one claim from every direction: the model is no longer the bottleneck — the harness, the context, and your attention are. Two years ago tool calling made chat programmable; now the calls run agent-to-agent, and the human's job is the switchboard.
Where A2A Begins and Ends
A2A hit v1.0 in April, and MCP's extension catalog made the two protocols look alike on paper. The actual boundary is stance: compose a transparent workbench, or delegate to an opaque peer.
Agents Get a UI
MCP was the USB port for agents. The 2026-07-28 revision gives that port a screen, with host-mediated widgets in the chat, plus extensions for tasks, auth, and whatever comes next.
mattpocock/skills v1.1: coding with alignment surfaces
The v1.1 release is useful because it turns agent coding into a loop we can share: align, spec, ticket, build, verify — with Wayfinder for work too foggy for one session.
Introducing Labs
There's so much to talk about that we need a better home for it — quarterly issues, clear lanes, and a place to look back without drowning in the archive.
What Surprised Us at the World's Fair
We read all 92 talk transcripts from the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026. The main report: what genuinely surprised us — with clips — plus six deep dives into the themes that mattered.
Conversation Roots, KV Reuse, and Local Agent Throughput
How to win local KV reuse: exact prefix rules, slot sizing, and measured results across Ollama and llama.cpp on a 64 GB M4 Max—same mechanism, one study.
AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — The Complete Talk Roundup
Every talk from the fair, read and distilled — 92 write-ups from ~319K words of transcripts, nine topic tracks, and the cross-cutting surprises.