A neutral home for MCP, A2A, goose, and more | AAIF co-founder Manik Surtani

Andrew (0:03)

Welcome back to Dev Interrupted, brought to you by LinearB. My guest today is Manik Surtani, co-founder and CTO of the Agentic AI Foundation, the home of MCP, Goose, agents.md, A2A, Agent Gateway, and so much more. This one's a treat for me as an ambassador for the foundation, because I got to learn from Manik about slob cannons and bottlenecks and how they come down to the same culprits we discuss at LinearB. That is, AI speeds up the coding and the cost moves downstream into review and rework. So what should a team do about this seemingly insurmountable review problem? You're about to find out in my conversation with Manik.

Usually I just know exactly where I want to start, but this one, there's like actually more things than I can bite into, so it's going to be a little difficult for me. And I want to start by saying, Manik, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you on Dev Interrupted.

Manik Surtani (1:02)

Thank you, Andrew. I'm very excited to be here.

Andrew (1:04)

Yes, and just to kick things off, I just want to say that, you know, as an AAIF ambassador, I feel like I have been drowning the airwaves over here at Dev Interrupted about all the things coming out of the foundation. So we're really excited to dive into those topics today, really excited to host you and get some insights for our listeners, which are, you know, engineering leaders that are trying to understand how to grapple with these changes in technology and the things that they've taken for granted and how they're evolving. And part of that involves learning about the latest trends in technology, but also getting ahead about how most cutting-edge teams are applying them to actually deliver value and make all of this AI stuff, you know, worthwhile in the end. But I just got to say, before I jump into our conversation today, I wanted to ask, what has been the most exciting for you as you've kicked off the AAIF ambassador program and you started rounding up a bunch of nerds like me under one banner? What has that experience been like? Because I just feel like I've seen so much love on every social media network since the program started.

Manik Surtani (2:08)

Yeah, it's been incredible. It's been overwhelming. And first off, thank you for being an ambassador.

The response has been crazy. Here's a funny story. When we first came up with the idea, the plan was we're going to have 10 ambassadors around the world, and we're going to start with 10 and then gradually expand. We had an arbitrary number. We just pulled it up out of thin air. And the moment we announced it, we got so many responses of people wanting to be ambassadors, that we had a mechanism of scoring them as well. And what have they done before as community organizers, things like that, right?

And we had a whole little algorithm in place, and we had over 150 people which scored over 95 percent. And it's like, we're going to have a really hard time picking the 10 people out of this. So we just blew the top off, saying we're just going to remove the cap. There is no arbitrary cap of 10 And we launched with, I think, 140-something ambassadors from day one.

Andrew (3:04)

Yeah, it was a big cohort. And it's so exciting because that's such a champagne problem to have. Like, oh, there's so many extremely qualified and really amazing people out there all across the world that are looking to spread the news about MCP and other projects, some of which we're going to talk about today. So and I definitely know when I saw the announcement that there were going to be 10, it definitely put this competitive spirit in my mind, too, of like, oh, wow, what a great opportunity. And so that made a lot of people surge to the challenge because, you know, you and Angie have done so much for kind of getting folks aligned around how the technology is moving and getting folks informed about how to use it every day, that there are so many folks that are willing to jump in and start making this kind of content, some of which we're going to dive into, including A2A being one of these latest additions to the AAIF. And I kind of want to start there because as one of the most recent announcements that definitely has some of the biggest excitement around it, I want to know from your perspective at the AAIF, what does the A2A or the Agent-to-Agent protocol bring and what does it signify for the trajectory of, you know, open source agent ecosystems? Like, what do you think its role will be to play alongside the other things you have under your wing?