Topic hub · 13 pieces

MCP and agent tool protocols

Anthropic published the Model Context Protocol in November 2024. Sixteen months later the MCP ecosystem map counted 97 million monthly SDK downloads, more than 20,000 servers and governance under the Linux Foundation. The same piece measured MCP tool calls at 4 to 35 times the tokens of equivalent CLI commands.

By June 2026 all eleven open-source agent runtimes in a separate survey supported the protocol. That month the agent-governance report counted 30 MCP CVEs and about 7,000 exposed servers. The pieces below follow adoption, security and the platforms, Stripe among them, that exposed their APIs to agents through MCP.

Timeline

  1. · Agents

    The MCP ecosystem map

    Sixteen months in, MCP counts 97M SDK downloads, 20,000+ servers, six framework attempts and one unsolved auth problem; this map covers who is shipping and where the protocol breaks at scale.

  2. · Tools

    Stop using Claude Code like a chatbot

    The Claude Code config Boris Cherny actually runs — settings.json layers, permissions, plan mode, memory, hooks, skills, subagents, MCPs, sandboxing, and the 5-worktree workflow.

  3. · Tools

    The complete developer's guide to Stripe Sessions 2026

    Stripe shipped 288 launches at Sessions 2026, but only 3 are GA day-one — here is what is actually buildable today, the new agent-payment protocol stack, and ten projects worth shipping this quarter.

  4. · Tools

    How to make your API agent-native — Stripe's developer playbook

    The 28-minute developer keynote at Stripe Sessions 2026 was a complete blueprint for retrofitting any API for agents, and while devtools Twitter mostly missed it, its seven-step playbook is laid out here line by line.

  5. · Agents

    Anthropic's developer doctrine in fifteen videos and a panel

    The Developers playlist is Anthropic's public lecture series for builders, and read against Building Effective Agents, MCP and Claude Code, its 15 videos hang together as one canon built on six core positions.

  6. · Tools

    What you can actually build with Cursor's SDK

    Cursor shipped @cursor/sdk in public beta on April 29, putting the same harness that powers the IDE behind a TypeScript API, and this working developer's tour covers every surface with code, gotchas and ideas.

  7. · Tools

    gbrain: the Postgres-native knowledge graph Garry Tan runs his AI agents on

    gbrain, the persistent memory layer behind Garry Tan's own AI agents, runs 66 autonomous cron jobs over 146,646 pages and 24,585 people, making it the rare self-hosted alternative to vector-DB wrappers in 2026.

  8. · Agents

    The agent-framework field reinvents the same five wheels

    Eleven OSS agent runtimes share one recurring pattern of memory, sandboxing, skills-vs-MCP, tool governance, and transport: only Letta solved memory, only smolagents solved sandboxing, and the 2026 vendor SDKs are quietly absorbing the rest into hosting platforms.

  9. · Business

    The agent-governance land-grab: who's buying the control plane

    Palo Alto bought Portkey, Cisco bought Astrix, Asana bought StackAI and $340M flowed into agent-identity startups in six weeks, as the five layers of the agent control plane get bought rather than built.

  10. · Tools

    Stop using OpenCode like a Claude Code clone

    The OpenCode config that earns its keep — opencode.json layers, the build/plan agents, permissions, AGENTS.md, MCP, and the bring-your-own-model setup that survives a vendor pulling your access.

  11. · Agents

    Supermemory open-sourced its memory engine. The moat moved somewhere else

    On June 10 Supermemory shipped its graph engine as a local binary anyone can run for free, and reading the repo, the docs, and the benchmark fight shows the giveaway is a distribution play, not a surrender.

  12. · Tools

    Mastra in production: the advanced patterns worth shipping

    An operator playbook for Mastra across six TypeScript codebases and the full 1.x line, covering memory's four layers, supervisors, MCP on both ends, RAG and evals, auth, observability, the 1.x migrations and the production bugs that taught the most.

  13. · Business

    Coding agents picked sides. Compute drew the lines.

    OpenAI is pulling its models from SpaceX-owned Cursor while Anthropic, which rents $1.25 billion a month of SpaceX compute, promises Cursor more Claude, and the new X Subscription now prices every rival model as an extra.

In the data

Rows from the CC BY 4.0 datasets that these pieces report. Each links to its row, primary source and method.

Funding and acquisitions · 3

Key primary sources

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