Mastodawn

In summary then, it is indeed quite like being at school. Half hour lessons on things that probably won't ever actually be useful to know in your particular job of varying levels of interest. Mostly pretty low interest honestly. Bumping into colleagues between lessons.

Learned the names of a couple of tools I might try. One google search would have gotten me those but I guess it's a question of thinking to look for them.

If you can judge the mood of an industry from a random selection of talks from a single conference then the industry is very optimistic that they can make AI write a lot of software.

It seems to think this is likely to mean fewer programmers rather than there being more software meaning more workers.

It wasn't as AI heavy as I thought when I first glanced at the program. Managed to mostly be not-ai I think.

Nobody talking about the ethical implications or suggesting joining a union and only one talk about the environment issue at all, it not really noting how much power the industry is about to take.

Liked having a few meals in amserdam with colleagues I never usually see (mostly remote workers, including me). The boss is pretty good at picking people really.

Get a day or so of holiday now too.

A panel. Is the EU over regulated? Can builders build here? Or will all the rules break industry?

The founders on stage start companies based from the start with compliance to regulation as a USP.

But regulators don't seem to understand the tech they regulate.

In survey 80% of companies chose to not enter the market because the laws are onerous. Government can't regulate industry that refuses to operate in their legal zones.

Companies may be spending 30% of their budget on legal compliance!

For my part I think good regulation is helpful but that much of the regulation here is bad, and some of it even malmotivated. Can encourage monopoly. The law is a mess.

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and is a api for agents. Storyblok has made their api into an MCP and Bernhard is here to tell us about that from the context of a psychologist.

Storyblok is a Content management system which can now have agents mess with it for you.

MCP standard connects agents to external systems. An mcp server runs to enable that.

Isn't the agent smart enough to use the api?

Well, they need documentation to figure out how anyway, so MCP rolls that in I guess? Avoid filling the context window with api docs.

Overlay specification from openapi let's you describe the api with a json doc.

The agent can query the server to search for commands, get the spec for the one they want, then call it.

"Skills" are troublesome because they gry loaded to dev machine and never updated. MCP stuff downloaded live on demand.

There exist tools to convert a rest apt to MCP but they apparently fail often because the machine ideally wants something different to a rest api.

Rowdy want to automate accessibility testing.

We all love accessibility, except those trying to enclose the web for private capital.

Wcag is the standard. Web content accessibility guidelines.

Playwrite is a node testing system and Axe-core is a Playwrite system to test accessibility.

He does a quick demo. Report seems nice. Axe seems like a good system for a11y checks.

A man called Confidence thinks, presumably confidently, that the best interface for a ai agent is not a chat window on a website but... Email!

Chat is synchronous, app specific, dies with a tab close.

But agents tasks can be asynchronous.

Email has identity, a wake event when messages arrive, has a way to reply asynchronously, can attach files, and agents can email each other.

Email is already everywhere.

He has a js library to deal with email to agent messages.

He does a demo including buying a domain and setting up his lib to handle email from it. Interestingly, there's still a web chat to it. Ha.

All of which makes sense but. Email? Really? Surely something more secure and encrypted is better? Something with sender signing so random hackers cant email it? I thought this was surely going to be satire.