Recent Reads (Issue 19) - Google Cloud Next Updates and a Agentic Systems
Agent development kit, Agent-to-agent protocol and the rise of MCP
A lot of very interesting items came out of the Google Cloud Next event last week. Unsurprisingly AI agents were a big part of it. Some interesting new launches included:
Agent Development Kit – An SDK to build and deploy agents. This is the SDK Google is currently using for its own agents
Agent2Agent protocol – To allow agents to talk to each other – comes with a big list of companies whose agents will be accessible via A2A
Firebase Studio – Google’s take on Lovable and other AI agents to build and deploy apps. Leaning on Firebase is great because unlike Lovable etc, Firebase has been building tools for building and managing apps for a long time.
MCP in production - I have been exploring MCP-fying some systems at work. The elevator pitch of MCPs are great but I am curious to learn from more folks who have actually integrated MCP into their systems. It’s always the details, like getting OAuth to work within a chat session, that create all sorts of headaches.
On AI coding mandates - I can definitely attest to a lot of what is shared here. The extremes of this conversation range from “AI will reduce development effort to almost zero” to “AI is stupid and is just glorified copy-paste”. The truth remains somewhere in the middle but the various communities are still trying to find that sweet spot. Organization culture will be a big part of how successfully companies will be able to use AI to accelerate their efforts
Firebase Functions support for streaming callables - Cloud functions can now stream responses back to the clients during execution rather than wait for the entire function to complete before returning the data. Given that the new AI systems do take a significant time to execute (like image generation for example), sending periodic updates to the client is more essential than a nice-to-have feature.
The blissful zen of a good side project - Definitely something I will endorse: a good side project is almost like a good game and both the challenges and the wins when you overcome them are great mood boosters, at least for me. Releasing those to the world though are a whole other question.
The Dire Wolves are back - Straight out of the Jurassic Park movie, I was amazed to read about how Colossal Biosciences created the till-recently extinct Dire Wolf cubs by using their genomic data.