Weekend Reads: Five Links
Google's live context, Microsoft's agent handshake and Rick Rubin-vibe-code ethos —here’s some of this week's reads in one scroll.
Project Astra
Google’s demo shows Gemini reading your screen and camera feed in real time, while also handling NL navigation, then handing that context to any app through a new Live API. Super excited about this project.
The multimodal context feed is going to be pretty awesome - they are bringing back Google Glass but with Warby Parker. Will cop.
Our vision for building universal AI assistant
Model Context Protocol
Windows, Azure, GitHub, and Copilot Studio now speak the same JSON dialect for passing user goals, tool calls, and auth tokens. It's called the “USB-C of AI.”
MCP was introduced by Anthropic last year, but its clear that we will be focusing on user workflows between products and grounding sources are going to be seamless.
A "Planning" agent can hand its plans and goals over to a "Scheduling" agent without the users having to re-enter data or fumble with permission flows.
Persistent agent memory instead of all the copy-paste gymnastics.
The age of AI agents and building the open agentic web
Microsoft "Book of News"
There was a truckload of announcements from Build - here are some I liked:
Copilot multi agent orchestration and MCP. This is getting baked into every layer of Windows, Azure, and Copilot tooling. Its also pushing for it to be industry standard. With this protocol, Microsoft is aiming to be the "agent factory". So exciting.
NLWeb - conversational interface FOR WEBCONTENT WHAT. So cool.
The Power Apps human-agent news is interesting. There has been a lot of buzz about the future of work being 1 human managing a large team of agents. Seems like Power Apps (Agent Feed) is getting started.
So many cool things here - browse it.
Google Labs: Stitch
Pretty cool. And free. You can generate UI, wireframes, user journeys - all with NL. You can get super iterative relatively quickly and it exports (Copy / Paste) to Figma and FE design pretty quickly.
My experience has been pretty much, "hey Google made a ux tool that is only barely ok compared to what is out there!".
I tried it. It made a static jpg. Im probably doing something wrong but Im excited to dig in more.
From idea to app: Introducing Stitch, a new way to design UIs.
Rick Rubin on Vibe coding
Rick Rubin has become the unofficial mascot of vibe coding.
He has fully embraced the title and has written a vibe coding counterpart to his "The Creative Act: A way of being" called: The Way of the Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding
Click around on the site - its as ethereal as the hard bound but I like his approach. #48 is one I liked:
In the pursuit of learning, each day complexity compounds. In the pursuit of Source, each day simplicity compounds.
✌🏼