Richard MacManus

Today's my first day in a new role: Head of Editorial at Latent Space. From ReadWriteWeb to The New Stack, I've always loved being at the cutting edge of tech x media. So I'm thrilled to join swyx & his team! www.latent.space

If you too are waiting patiently for your old website or blog to show up on Classic Web, feel free to make some suggestions as a comment here. I (i.e. @ricmac) don't choose the items — I just click yes or no — but I can influence The Machine by feeding it more data.

Social media has only gone downhill from this moment.

So much of this happening right now. Shame on Google for not punishing these companies! Great job Maggie and Futurism for lifting the rock on these critters.

GitHub invented pull requests, and for 18 years they've been open by default. But now some of the top AI-native open source projects are shutting PRs off, because they’ve found a better way. www.latent.space/p/pr-not-wel...

Lovable is branching out from AI-powered web app creation and into MCP-powered ‘capabilities’. I talk to CTO Fabian Hedin about why agents are the future of SaaS and how Lovable built an architecture for a "company brain." www.latent.space/p/lovable-fu...

Model routing is having a moment thanks to the $7B Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter. But it's also increasingly important in enterprises. In my latest article, I talk to Glean CEO Arvind Jain about why model routing helps control AI costs for organizations. www.latent.space/p/glean-mode...

Some lovely memories of my former TNS colleague Darryl Taft in this memorial post. RIP Darryl, you were one of the great tech journalists. They certainly don’t make ‘em like they used to. thenewstack.io/darryl-taft-...

I talk to Astro creator Fred Schott about his agent framework, Flue — which has just moved to v2 and added React-style hooks. We discuss how React inspired him, why agents need a harness, and the Cloudflare connection (incl competing with Vercel’s eve). www.latent.space/p/flue-2

Some of you old webheads might enjoy my latest post on Latent Space. It turns out the Semantic Web is alive and well, in the form of ontologies being used to keep LLMs honest. www.latent.space/p/ontologies...

Bloody hell, you can actually go in and read the threads. MEMORIES UNLOCKED

This week's Agentic Web News covers the rise of the agentic web as a concept, browsers integrated into the agentic tools of OpenAI and Anthropic, real momentum for the WebMCP protocol, plus further agentic commerce and web development news. agenticweb.news/browsers-in-...

My personal reflections on a hectic and inspiring week in San Francisco, covering the AI Engineer World's Fair. agenticweb.news/ai-engineer-...

Very sad to hear of the passing of Om Malik, one of the original tech bloggers. Our sites competed in the Technorati era, but he was one of the kindest, wisest and most generous people I met in Silicon Valley. RIP Om — one of tech’s original minds. cybercultural.com/p/026-rww-re...

This week’s market signals suggest the agentic web is entering a new phase. AWS + Adobe (MCP), Vercel (eve), Okta (agent identity) and Google (Agentic Resource Discovery) are all building different layers of what is becoming the enterprise agent stack. agenticweb.news/agent-stack-...

If you like writing long threads on Bluesky, wait until you discover "blog posts." Start blogging with @pckt.blog, @leaflet.pub or @offprint.app today and get 25% off your first year, on us.

What does "web-based" actually mean in 2026? While pondering that, the Web 2.0 cliche "the web is made of people" came to mind, a saying that perhaps derived from the 1973 dystopian movie Soylent Green. Some Friday musings from an ol' webhead just trying to keep it real... ricmac.org/2026/06/19/t...

Turns out websites have a future in the AI era after all. I talk to an e-commerce founder about why his team is building around the emerging #WebMCP open standard. agenticweb.news/nekuda-webmc...

The agentic web is moving from read and write... to read, write and execute! This week’s signals span agent payments, callable app actions, persistent cloud execution and portable organisational knowledge. agenticweb.news/agentic-web-...

The user interface is moving from pages into agents. MCP Apps, atomic brand kits and headless CMS infrastructure all point to the same shift: apps, brands and content becoming machine-readable components that agents can assemble for users. ricmac.org/2026/06/12/u...

My latest interview with agentic web builders is with Ido Salomon & Liad Yosef, about MCP Apps and the rise of software apps inside of AI assistants & agents. In particular, they're focused on the UI aspects — including now generative UI. agenticweb.news/mcp-apps/

New on Agentic Web News: The machine-readable web becomes a business problem In this week's market signals post, I connect Cloudflare, Microsoft Web IQ, atomic brand kits, Salesforce + Contentful, and The Economist’s ChatGPT app. agenticweb.news/agentic-web-...

Who owns that AI agent? I wrote about DNSid, a project from Innovation Labs / Identity Digital that wants to use DNS as an accountability layer for agents on the web. The agentic web needs identity — ideally open, shared infrastructure rather than platform control. agenticweb.news/who-owns-ai-...

"If I were building a website tomorrow, or building a SaaS app tomorrow, I would probably build it MCP-first, because that’s how agents increasingly want to consume this." A quote from my interview with Alex Salazar, CEO of Arcade — building middleware for agents. agenticweb.news/arcade-actio...

In this week's Agentic Web News market signals, I look at the economic layers now emerging in the agentic web: 📡 Agentic advertising enters its “wild west” phase 🛒 Amazon launches agentic shopping infra 🆔 DNS-AID points to the need for agent identity & discovery agenticweb.news/agentic-web-...

The open social web needs more horses.

"Hey...let's be careful out there." Prompted by the immortal words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues, I look at two lessons from RunSignup’s careful AI rollout. I also reflect on some of the negative consequences of agentic AI this week (tech layoffs, etc). ricmac.org/2026/05/29/a...

Testing the new @standard.site integration. ricmac.leaflet.pub/3mjwy6k77u22q I like how it makes it stand out as a publication. Great to see WordPress also supporting this, as well as the Atmosphere native apps like Leaflet. (Nb: you need to upgrade your Bluesky app to see the difference)

Readers, writers, publishers of the Atmosphere, exciting news: Bluesky shipped @standard.site integration! Posts and publications from Leaflet now render on the timeline with some *special sauce* — see it in this very post :) More in Lab Notes…including a new standard.site post block in Leaflet!

v1.122 is rolling out today, featuring a better way to discover and share articles, blog posts and newsletters across the Atmosphere via new, dynamic Standard.site link cards. 🧵

RunSignup, a web platform for race organizers, is deploying AI chatbots and building agentic infrastructure across its product. I spoke to founder Bob Bickel about how MCP, AI assistants, and conversational interfaces are reshaping SaaS. agenticweb.news/runsignup-ai...

My analysis of Google I/O: Google laid out a big, not always coherent vision for making the web more agent-ready. The strongest signals came from Chrome, while Gemini Spark and AI search raise questions. Also: could Parallel’s Index solve AI’s publisher economics? agenticweb.news/google-agent...

I’ve just launched Agentic Web News: signals, interviews and analysis on the next phase of the web. I'm using the Ghost platform for this; am hoping to eventually turn this into a subscription newsletter. Check it out if you're intrigued about this new era of the web. agenticweb.news/welcome-to-a...

The agentic web is becoming a business issue. As AI agents begin to discover, interpret and act on websites, businesses need to rethink what their websites are for. My new post looks at what this means for business leaders, product teams, publishers and developers. ricmac.org/2026/05/13/w...

What is the agentic web? I’ve published a new post defining the term and placing it in historical context: Read web → Read/write web → Platform web → Agentic web The key point: websites aren’t disappearing. Indeed, I'd argue their role is expanding. ricmac.org/2026/05/08/w...

AX was the new DX. Now it’s becoming the new UX. In my latest post, I explore how "agent experience" has morphed beyond "developer experience" and become a branch of "user experience". ricmac.org/2026/05/05/a... #AgenticWeb

Ha, @ernie.tedium.co also mentioned this in a comment, but this is *so* GeoCities :) Which is a good thing, in my book — visual creativity on the web is to be encouraged, in a world of bland social media / Medium / etc designs. Dare I say, maybe even a bit of early MySpace anarchy?

great vision / examples for how "atmospheric websites" can better serve organizers — from global event listings, to shared collections of resources, to interoperable social graphs… exciting space here to explore collaboratively!

Pssssst! Are you making an atmosphere landing page and/or refactoring your sign up because of recent ✨discourse✨? I got what you need. *Opens trench coat to reveal convenient, flattened, normalized svg atmosphere logos in color and b&w* www.figma.com/community/fi... tangled.org/cozylittle.h...

New post -> Agentic web patterns: what Web 2.0 taught me I connect a story from my early Web 2.0 days — working on "design patterns for Web 2.0" — with the emerging patterns I’m now seeing for AI on websites. ricmac.org/2026/04/28/a...

I’ve been exploring how AI is changing websites over the past few months — both writing about it and building a few things. I’m now working as an agentic web consultant, and I’ve just produced a 36-page playbook on how to add AI to a website. You can request it here: ricmac.org/agentic-web-...

Reflections on 23 years of blogging; and why I still raise a toast to the real RWW, despite what’s happened to it over the past decade.

🎵 A mosquito Our reginos Yeah!

Sorry, no leaflets today because of the reginos.

Thoughts on 'informal blogging' by doing an audio note in the Day One app. Also: why I've put my 'formal blog' Cybercultural on pause.

Cool slice of blogging history, great to see Leaflet mentioned as part of this new open social ecosystem echoing some of the blogosphere's early days (indeed the atmosphere's still early too!) thanks @ricmac.org I also like this idea for a sidebar / *leafroll* :)

There's a lot in Leaflet that reminds me of Radio Userland in 2003. Including that its informal blogging format (or "EZ blogging" as @pfrazee.com calls it) encourages a different kind of open social participation. Remember when we used to think through topics by blogging them? #BringBackBlogging

I started a @semble.so, which is "a social knowledge network for research built on the AT Protocol." My first collection is about Internet History, and I've made it open so anyone can add to it: semble.so/profile/ricm...