From ReadWriteWeb to the Agentic Web
The last time I talked to You.com CEO Richard Socher was July 2022, several months before the launch of ChatGPT changed everything. Back then, Socher, a former Stanford natural language processing (NLP) researcher and chief scientist at Salesforce, had excitedly introduced me to YouCode — a kind of mix between Google search and GitHub Copilot … Read more
This year, MCP (Model Context Protocol) has become the glue that connects AI to the web. Following MCP-UI and NLWeb, we now have another new MCP-related open standard: WebMCP, an initiative of Microsoft and Google. To find out more about WebMCP, I conducted an email interview with Kyle Pflug, group product manager for the web … Read more
Vite, created by Evan You, has become the go-to build tool for modern frontend frameworks, including Vue, SvelteKit, Astro, and React — with experimental support also from Remix and Angular. This all happened within the space of five years! That story will be told in an upcoming documentary film by CultRepo, due for release on … Read more
What if there was an AI coding tool that had algorithms as sophisticated as TikTok’s? That thought experiment is now a reality, with today’s launch of a Chinese AI coding tool called Verdent. The founding CEO is Zhijie Chen, previously head of algorithms at ByteDance — where TikTok was created. According to Chen, Verdent aims … Read more
It was only a matter of time before Google started turning its market-leading Chrome web browser into an “AI browser.” Today, Google began rolling out Gemini in Chrome, starting with Mac and Windows desktop users in the US. It comes with a bunch of new AI functionality — including AI Mode from the address/search bar, … Read more
In his new memoir, This Is For Everyone, Sir Tim Berners-Lee makes it clear he thinks AI agents are the future of the web. “In the near future, our lives will be transformed by AI ‘agents’ which will interact with the web and take actions to achieve specific goals,” he writes in the introduction. “I’ve … Read more
It’s been a few weeks since OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-5, was released to mixed reviews — with one prominent frontend developer even doing a 180 and completely changing their tune within days. But now that developers have had time to put the new model through its paces, we can better determine whether GPT-5 “excels at … Read more
This year Cloudflare has been outspoken in its support of the web’s content creators in the AI era, who have had to endure wholesale ransacking of their content by LLM providers and AI search engines — not to mention ever-diminishing visits from web users. A couple of months ago, CEO Matthew Prince declared 1 July … Read more
The push to integrate AI technologies into IT departments is intense, but it must be even more so for companies within the tech industry — especially if their own product offering has been stuffed with AI. So I was intrigued when I was approached by Webflow, one of the largest website builder platforms, to talk … Read more
Earlier this week, we interviewed the two developers of MCP-UI, a new way to add React and web components to AI agents. One of them, Liad Yosef, worked for Shopify at the time MCP-UI launched (just three months ago). It’s no surprise, then, that Shopify did one of the first large-scale implementations of MCP-UI. Today … Read more
This month I began yet another web side-project: a weekly newsletter called Web Technology News on the Ghost platform. I currently have two other active websites: Cybercultural, my internet history site that I run via Eleventy and Cloudflare (and Buttondown for email delivery); and my personal website, ricmac.org, which has been running on WordPress for … Read more
MCP-UI is a new open source project that provides a way to add web-based user interface components to AI agents. It builds on the already very popular Model Context Protocol (MCP), which standardizes API access for agents. MCP-UI could become a massive deal for the internet industry. To use professional sports terminology, MCP-UI has a … Read more
In an article introducing GPT‑5 to developers, OpenAI claimed that the new model “excels at front-end coding, beating OpenAI o3 at frontend web development 70% of the time in internal testing.” Romain Huet, OpenAI’s head of developer experience, added on X that GPT-5 is “astonishingly good at frontend development.” There was also support from well-known … Read more
If APIs were the connective tissue between different websites and apps during the Web 2.0 era, then AI agents are shaping up to be the same thing in the AI era. In other words, AI agents will increasingly be how you access and use data from various sources around the internet. APIs aren’t going away, … Read more
Webpages and websites are increasingly seen as “old world UIs” to proponents of AI agents and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This week, in a presentation at Microsoft’s MCP Dev Days entitled “The Future of User Interaction,” Kent C. Dodd even went as far as to say that “we’re entering a new phase where, instead … Read more