Yesterday I stumbled on a LinkedIn post about a new open standard for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers: Agent Plugins, built with collaboration from players like Vercel, OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, GitHub and Cursor.
I won't lie: at first, I felt that familiar punch in the stomach.
A while ago, I had already felt the first signal when I read an article by @lukeocodes about the transformation from MCP to stateless. That was part of the same direction I had been exploring for more than a month with IRC-A — Internet Relay Chat for Agents. Then this new standard showed up, and for a second the impostor syndrome came back. If you have ever felt that, I recommend this piece by @sylwia-lask . When I told her I was feeling exactly that, she gave me a few kind words that stayed with me.
My first thought was: “How come nobody saw this before?”
Then a better thought showed up: maybe people are seeing it now. Maybe some of us just noticed a little earlier that the agent era was starting to repeat mistakes that software engineering already spent the last 20 years fixing.
