🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Angela Oduor Lungati, technologist, community builder, and mentor to so many young developers. Angela has dedicated much of her career to providing opportunities for others in Africa’s tech ecosystem, co-founding AkiraChix to help young women gain practical skills, confidence, and pathways into software development careers. Today she continues that mission through her leadership work at Ushahidi, supporting the use of technology for social impact and civic engagement. Thank you for everything you do, Angela, and for investing so deeply in the next generation of builders! 💙
💯 Spotlight
Have y’all noticed a recent shift in attitude toward vibe coding? My LinkedIn feed is full of people saying it’s not maintainable, only generates “AI slop”, and is causing people to get lazy. I even saw a podcast episode titled “do developers even need to learn to code anymore” (to which the obvious answer is yes). But all these arguments seem surface-level without proper backing. Until a concerning read I found from Ahmed Ibrahim citing multiple research studies about what AI-assisted coding is doing to the open-source world. The post talks about some of our favorite OSS like cURL and Tailwind CSS going through serious issues because of one reason or another related to AI. It’s an interesting read, and one I highly recommend for awareness of what’s going on as a result of asking Claude to “just build that one thing real quick.” Kinda scary.
🔥 My Favorite Content
Well here’s something different. I found an article written by AI about how MCP won, but it might also be dead. The article goes through a considerable amount of justification around MCP being adopted as the standard, but talks about the shortcomings at length. It talks about how MCP is the right abstraction but everyone is building their own tool formats anyway - so it built a tool abstraction of its own, which reminds me of this xkcd comic. That said, the article is actually good, and the bot writes a lot of content that feels existential about AI. The whole thing is interesting to me, and it even has its own Twitch channel.
To add but also completely contradict that post, we had an article from Michael Lanham saying that MCP isn’t dead, but it’s not the default answer anymore. It spends most of the time pushing three main drawbacks of the protocol: massive token consumption, sketchy security mechanisms, and poor scaling capabilities. This article is full of real talk that describes why we’re seeing a big backlash against MCP all of a sudden, but also grounds us with the mentality that it’s not a panacea - it’s a layer in proper agent design.
Zooming out a level, Luca Bianchi shared a great comparison of Strands SDK and Claude Agent SDK for agent design. He calls out how the two packages attempt to tackle the same problem, but with very different assumptions. I like his direct comparison and recommendations for when to use one over the other. He also rabbit-holes into making non-Claude models run through the Claude Agent SDK, pointing out some serious gotchas. Funnily enough, he wraps the article with a recommendation to build all your tools as MCP servers. So is MCP dead, or is it not?!
Shifting away from MCP, Darryl Ruggles published a thorough blog post on Lambda powertools best practices clearly learned from experience. He covers the rich capabilities of the package, but for me the best part was near the bottom of the article where he showed how it integrated with an example application and how he uses. Theory is great, but it’s just that. The best lessons are learned through experience and being hands-on, which is what Darryl brings us in this post. Great work!
💡 Tip of the Week
If all this “should I or shoudn’t I” with MCP has you confused, why not try building Agent Skills instead 🤣? In all seriousness, Addy Osmani has a great post on LinkedIn with 5 design patterns to consider when making a skill.
🐣 New Releases
Reminder, all releases from AWS can be found on AWS News by Luc van Donkersgoed. Below are my favorite from last week.
Congratulations to our new AWS heroes! Welcome Maurizio Argoneto, Ray Goh, and Sheyla Leacock! Thank you so much for all your hard work.
AgentCore Runtime now supports the AG-UI protocol, which is an event-based protocol that standardizes how agents interact with user interfaces. Pretty cool!
The 2026 roadmap for MCP came out last week, fully acknowledging the weaker areas of the spec, like scaling the transport mechanism, enterprise readiness, and governance maturation. It also is prioritizing tasks as a long-lived entity, which feels like it’s starting to converge with A2A in a good way. Lots coming here (maybe, based on everything else this issue).
Last Words
It’s funny how the MCP hype seems to come in waves. This time around though, it seems to be under more scrutiny than before. But strangely enough, it’s also being adopted more? This one bewilders me and I’m curious to see how it plays out. There’s just so much going on with agent development and maturing as an industry around this frontier.
That’s my take on the week, but what’s yours?
What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you’re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.
Happy coding!
Allen