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

MCP was already a hit before it had a neutral home. Then Manik Surtani helped launch the Agentic AI Foundation, and MCP's SDK downloads grew fivefold to over a billion. This week on Dev Interrupted, he joins Andrew to share why he expects the same kind of growth for A2A and the foundation's other newest projects, and why these protocols belong together in a neutral place. Manik also shares the unique reasons behind A2A’s rapid adoption in China’s mobile app ecosystem. They close the conversation on why open source projects like Goose now want your ideas instead of your pull requests, and the neverending roadshow making it all possible out in the community right now.

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Follow today's guest:

• Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF): The foundation's home for working groups, blogs, events and news https://aaif.io
• The Daily Agentic AI Newsletter: The AAIF's news and views, published on LinkedIn.
• A2A: The agent-to-agent protocol that grew out of Google and recently joined the AAIF https://a2a-protocol.org
• A2A joins AAIF: The foundation's announcement
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): One of the AAIF's founding projects https://modelcontextprotocol.io
• goose: The open source agent Manik oversaw at Block, now an AAIF project https://block.github.io/goose
• AGENTS.md: The AAIF's third founding project https://agents.md
• agentgateway: An open gateway for agentic AI traffic, including token spend tracking https://agentgateway.dev
• Agent Router: The related AAIF project Manik mentions alongside agentgateway https://theagentrouter.ai
• AGNTCY: The Cisco-backed agent stack whose ACP spec gave way to A2A https://agntcy.org
• Connect with Manik: LinkedIn | X
• Manik's Substack: Manik's writing on open source and AI. https://maniksurtani.substack.com

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