Explained: Model Context Protocol (MCP)

You open your editor and ask the AI assistant why last night's build failed. A few seconds later it has pulled the CI logs, found the failing test, opened the commit that broke it, and checked whether anyone already filed a ticket. You never pasted a single log line into the chat. Not long ago, that kind of reach had to be built by hand. Someone wrote code that taught this particular assistant to talk to this particular CI system, then did it… Read More

Explained: Machine Payments Protocol

You find an API that does exactly what you need. You only want to make a handful of calls to see if it works. Before the first request goes out, you are creating an account, confirming your email, entering a credit card, choosing a pricing tier and copying an API key into an environment variable. Ten minutes of paperwork for a few cents of usage. Now picture an AI agent in the same position. It is halfway through a research task and hits a paid d… Read More

Explained: SASL

You're wiring up a new mail server. You reach the part where clients log in, and you open the SMTP docs to find not one login method but a menu of them: PLAIN , LOGIN , CRAM-MD5 , SCRAM-SHA-256 , OAUTHBEARER , GSSAPI . Then you open the IMAP docs for the same server, and it's the same menu again. Then LDAP. Then XMPP. The same names, the same handshakes, described separately in four different specifications. That repetition is exactly the probl… Read More