Belated Book Announcement and a Podcast Appearance

Let's kick off this newsletter with a bang and/or announcement: I’m writing a full-length book for O’Reilly Media! The title is AI Agents with MCP and it is currently in early release for subscribers to O’Reilly’s learning platform. It is scheduled for release in dead tree and ebook forms in early 2026.

I’m really excited for this. I started building with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol late last year, not too long after it was first released, and I’ve had a blast using it. Doing things beyond building servers was always a struggle, though, and my experience of writing a client to support MCP in an agent framework I was building (shoutout to TribeAI) inspired me to write this book. It will cover the history, inspiration, and architecture of MCP, dive deep into the 3 principle components of the protocol (clients, servers, and transports), and then be rounded out with a project that gives you a chance to use and work on all of those components.

To follow along with new versions of the early release book and AI news in general, sign up for The Signal Path, my new AI-focused newsletter!

I also was a guest on The Data Engineering Channel last week. Give it a view (or listen) to hear some fun war stories and things I learned from my years working in startups before going solo.