Ciao! 👋 Quick one for you this week, because it's a real opportunity rather than a think-piece: as a media partner of AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe, I've got my subscribers 25% off — and the event is in our backyard, Amsterdam, on 17–18 September. If you build agents, tooling, or the platforms they run on, this is the most relevant conference I've seen land this side of the Atlantic this year. Here's why, plus the code. 1) Three signals I'm watching Agentic AI is consolidating around open protocols. MCP went from "interesting" to "the default connector" in about a year. AGNTCon + MCPCon exists precisely because the agent stack is now a protocols-and-tooling problem, not just a model problem. The people writing the specs are on the stage. David Soria Parra, co-creator of the Model Context Protocol at Anthropic, is keynoting — alongside Clare Liguori (AWS, core MCP maintainer), Angie Jones (Agentic AI Foundation), and Dexter Horthy (HumanLayer, who coined "context engineering"). That's rare access to the people defining the standards. Certification is showing up next to the conference. The Linux Foundation is running the Model Context Protocol Associate (MCPA) certification on-site. If you're hiring or positioning yourself in this space, a vendor-neutral credential tied to the actual protocol matters more than another course badge. 2) My take: protocols beat frameworks for staying power I've watched enough "agent frameworks" appear and fade. What survives is usually the interface, not the implementation — and MCP is becoming that interface between models and the systems they act on. For platform and DevOps teams, the practical read is simple: spend your learning budget on the protocol, the identity model around agents, and how you'll observe and govern tool calls. That travels across every framework. The framework you picked in March probably won't. → AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe — about the event 3) From the field