Over the last weekend the Langflow team was out at the CascadiaJS conference and Cascadia AI Hackathon. It was inspiring to meet so many developers, work with them on their AI hacks, and see fewer demo hiccups than a Meta product launch. The winning team built a full music sequencer, MIDI keyboard and visualizer that generated beats that could then be edited by hand or further with AI. Congratulations to the winning teams and to everyone who built something and learned something new over the weekend (and 👋 if I met you at any of the Cascadia events).

This week in AI++ more people share how they build AI agents, there's an open source clone of a popular agent, and we reconsider the best ways to write MCP tools. Plus: how to stop agents scheming, how NotebookLM was designed, and a cursed programming language.

Phil Nash
Developer relations engineer for Langflow

🛠️ Building with AI, Agents & MCP

​Engineering an AI app

From interaction models to reasoning strategies, this article goes through many of the choices you have to make when building an AI app. It's all based on the experience of writing apps like new.email.

📺 FAANG PM reveals how to build AI agents​

This is a great interview/live coding/vibe coding session where a PM veteran shows how you can build AI agents that really work, featuring Langflow for back-end work and v0 for the front-end.

​Build MCPs for LLMs, not developers​

This article from Vercel looks into how to better design MCP servers to optimize for LLM memory and context. It's time to unlearn everything you thought you knew about API design to move into effective MCP design.

The Anthropic team also shared a post on writing effective tools for agents with a lot of detail.

​Chunking strategies to improve your RAG performance​

This article from Weaviate probably goes deeper than you ever thought you'd need to about chunking data. But when you're building RAG-powered AI apps that rely on the right context at the right time, the way you chunk matters.

Before you can chunk you need to extract the data, and IBM just announced Granite-Docling, a tiny model for document understanding. Docling is a powerful way to extract data and is available inside Langflow too.

​OpenPoke: recreating Poke's architecture​

Poke is an agent you can chat to in iMessage. Not satisfied with just using Poke, this developer wrote about reverse engineering a bunch of its features to release an open-source version called OpenPoke.

🗞️ Other news

• ​ChatGPT now has support for MCP tools, in a developer mode that means you need to understand that it is "powerful but dangerous"
• Meanwhile, Google announced an Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an extension of MCP and A2A that brings payments to agents while maintaining authorization, authenticity and accountability
• Tired: hallucinations. Wired: scheming. Check out this research on agent scheming from Apollo Research and OpenAI
• The way we design AI applications is changing so there is a lot we can learn from this breakdown of the design for NotebookLM​
• Watch out for overfitting your prompts to your model, and make sure you are rewriting your prompts​
• Simon Willison thinks we now have a good definition for "agents"​

🧑‍💻 Code & Libraries

• The awesome-ai-apps repo just crossed 6k stars and has many examples of agents written in different frameworks
• Geoff Huntley let Claude run for 3 months and now he has a genz programming language called cursed​
• Learn more about context engineering by digging into how OpenAI's Agents SDK handles memory management​
• ​Vercel released mcp-to-ai-sdk, a tool to translate MCP tools to tool definitions so that you can control tool descriptions statically

🔦 Langflow Spotlight

If you're building agents in Langflow you know that you need to hook up tools to your agent. The simple agent template shows you two such tools, the calculator and URL. But did you know that you can turn almost any Langflow component (including the agent component itself) into a tool, just by flipping a switch.

It's called Tool Mode and it enables all the tools a component can provide, allowing you to edit their names and descriptions. So, if you want to make search APIs, data ingestion or other agents available to your agent, just toggle Tool Mode.

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🗓️ Events

October 8th, 11:00 AM PDT – Security is the topic of The Flow as David and Carter chat with Max Gerber from Stytch. Catch it live or subscribe to the podcast to get the recording.

October 15th–16th – join the Langflow team at AI for the rest of us in London. Promising two days of inspiring and practical sessions that demystify jargon, share real world stories of AI in action, and include developer focused sessions and hands-on workshops, this will be a fantastic community event. You can save 20% off the cost of a ticket with the code LANGFLOWCREW.