This is the first of four parts in this series. 1. ELI5: Understanding MCP Imagine you have a single universal plug that fits all your devices—that’s essentially what the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is for AI. MCP is an open standard (think “USB-C for AI integrations”) that allows AI models to connect to many different apps and data sources in a consistent way. In simple terms, MCP lets an AI assistant talk to various software tools using a common language, instead of each tool requiring a different adapter or custom code. So, what does this mean in practice? If you’re […]

Our AI Codecon conference kicked off today with Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It. Here are my opening remarks introducing the series’ themes. You can reserve your seat for upcoming AI Codecon events here. Thanks so much for joining us today. We have over 20,000 people signed up for this event, both subscribers on the O’Reilly learning platform and those who aren’t yet subscribers. I think you’re here because you all sense what I do: We’re witnessing not the end of programming but its remarkable expansion. This is the most exciting moment in software […]

After a post by Andrej Karpathy went viral, “vibe coding” became the buzzword of the year—or at least the first quarter. It means programming exclusively with AI, without looking at or touching the code. If it doesn’t work, you have the AI try again, perhaps with a modified prompt that explains what went wrong. Simon Willison has an excellent blog post about what vibe coding means, when it’s appropriate, and how to do it. While Simon is very positive about vibe coding, he’s frustrated that few of the people who are talking about it have read to the end of […]