This Town Needs a Sheriff, and I Am One of the Deputies
I’ve been thinking about open standards for a long time. It’s kind of baked into what I do — OpenFeature, flagd, CNCF. Most of my open source work lives in that space where a community agrees on a contract so the ecosystem can grow around it.
So when the Agentic AI Foundation announced their ambassador program, it felt like the right moment to get involved.
The agentic AI space right now feels like the wild west. A new framework every week, new concepts, new acronyms, new opinions about the right way to build. Some of it is genuinely good thinking. A lot of it is noise. And it’s very hard to tell which is which when everything arrives at the same velocity.
I keep thinking about the early container ecosystem. Before CNCF there was the same kind of energy — exciting, chaotic, deeply fragmented. What the foundation did wasn’t slow things down; it gave everyone a place to converge. Maturity indicators, vendor-neutral governance, a landscape you could actually navigate. Not a monopoly on ideas — a shared ground beneath them.
That’s what the agentic space is missing, and AAIF is the thing stepping into the gap: bringing some order without killing the energy. This town needs a sheriff. I want to be a deputy.
MCP, Goose, AGENTS.md — early signs the community wants shared contracts, not just shared enthusiasm. I already work with most of these. (Goose is still on my todo list, admittedly.) But the direction is right.
What I’m actually curious about isn’t the tools. It’s what open standards unlock downstream. In the CNCF world, standards didn’t just make tooling interoperable — they made teams interoperable. A platform engineer moving between companies could reason about the stack. A new hire could orient faster. Shared vocabulary cut the tax of starting from scratch every time.
I think the same happens here, eventually. The space settles, some approaches consolidate, others fade, and what survives probably looks more like protocols than products. AAIF being a Linux Foundation project matters for that — it signals seriousness about governance and longevity, the difference between a project with a roadmap and a framework with a VC behind it.
I don’t know exactly what the ambassadorship will produce yet. One public contribution a month — talks, content, community. That’s the commitment, and I’m happy to make it.
What I do know is that the conversations worth having right now — how teams actually work with agents, what shared understanding looks like before the agent runs, what we’re really optimizing for — need somewhere to happen. Not just on Twitter, not just in scattered blog posts, but in a community with enough shared vocabulary to make the arguments productive.
I’m looking forward to building exactly that, with a lot of talented and inspiring people.