Tech analyst, AI & the web
Richard MacManus 
AI is changing how people use websites — shifting from navigation to delegation. Instead of browsing pages, users increasingly rely on AI systems to answer questions, summarize content, and retrieve information. This post explores what that means in practice, and introduces a playbook for adapting.
The web is shifting from pages to actions. As AI agents increasingly act on behalf of users, websites are evolving from content destinations into systems that expose capabilities — things machines can discover, combine and execute. In this post, I explore what’s driving the “agentic web,” from MCP and browser-native AI to changing discovery and monetization, and what it means for product teams, publishers and developers.
I built an “article assistant” that can answer questions about a page using local AI in the browser — with a cloud fallback when needed. This post is a conceptual walkthrough of how it works, from on-device inference with Gemini Nano to a simple capability-based routing layer.
Websites may soon expose capabilities directly to AI agents. In this post I experiment with WebMCP on my personal site, implementing two browser-side tools that allow an AI assistant to search an article and subscribe a user to my newsletter.
I built an AI chatbot for my personal website called Ask Ricmac. In this post I explain how it works and how I used Cloudflare Workers, Vectorize, D1, Workers AI and MCP to build it.
As AI agents begin interacting directly with websites and services, a new “Web AI stack” is emerging. Here’s my attempt to map the technologies shaping this next phase of the web.
It’s rare that a web product lasts 25 years, given how fast the industry cycles through technologies. But this month marks a quarter century of Drupal, the open source content management system (CMS). To mark the occasion, and also to discuss the launch of Drupal CMS 2.0 — which, confusingly, is not version 2 of … Read more
So, is RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) dead now? Last May I asked that question of Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual AI, based on the growing hype around MCP (Model Context Protocol). Both are data retrieval mechanisms for Large Language Models, but it’s MCP that has taken all the headlines over the past year. The truth is, … Read more
Late last week, the global cloud platform Cloudflare acquired the company behind Astro, one of the leading frontend frameworks. This follows a pattern of popular frameworks coming under the umbrella of platform companies — or at least becoming financially supported by them. This trend perhaps began in 2021, when Vercel hired Svelte creator Rich Harris. … Read more
Tailwind has been in the news lately, as it struggles to keep its doors open in the AI era. But it’s not the only “CSS-in-JS” solution to compete for developers’ attention. Recently Meta has been promoting its open source, React-based styling project, StyleX. Unlike Tailwind, it’s not a framework — Meta calls it both a … Read more
One of the big AI development trends of last year was the shift to on-device inference, in many cases using so-called small language models (SLMs). Google is leading the charge on this, with its “Web AI” initiative and technology such as LiteRT.js, its Web AI runtime. But this trend toward processing inference on the user’s … Read more
When I went to the first AI Engineer Summit in October 2023, AI agents were a joke. At that point, agents hadn’t proven they could consistently do even basic tasks. But fast forward just two years, and agentic technology has made big strides — albeit it’s still relatively unproven as completely autonomous software. Regardless, agents … Read more
This week, Google launched A2UI, an open source project to help developers build “agentic user interfaces.” It’s the latest in what’s becoming a regular release cycle of new standards and protocols for building a user interface in AI agents and chatbots. First, there was MCP-UI, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem project closely aligned with … Read more
There was a further shift away from complexity in web development this year, with frontend frameworks like Astro and Svelte gaining popularity as more developers looked for solutions beyond the React ecosystem. Meanwhile, native web platform features proved they’re up to the job of building sophisticated web applications — with CSS in particular improving over … Read more
OpenAI’s Apps SDK launched in early October, enabling developers to build mini web apps for ChatGPT. While we haven’t yet seen the promised ChatGPT app store, third-party developers have already begun to experiment with the SDK. For instance, TELUS Digital has built a proof-of-concept ChatGPT app, “a stock and news tracker with market data, interactive … Read more