After the first cohort of Build Intelligent Networks with AI, one thing became really clear: the people are hungry for AI knowledge and hands on skills. They are showing ready to learn. They want to know how to make agents actually hold up inside a real network. So @MacroEngineered and I rebuilt the workshop around exactly that. Build Intelligent Networks with AI — Cohort 2 Hosted by Packt. 4 hours, live, hands-on. This one goes deeper into the engineering side of agentic AI for networking: – Moving from raw MCP tools to structured, composable skills – Spec-driven development as a discipline for controlling agent behavior (not a prompt trick) – Designing agentic loops that know when they're stuck and hand back control safely – A deep dive into OpenClaw and NetClaw as production-ready frameworks for network agent workflows Will takes the first half on skills and spec-driven development. I take the second half on agentic loops and a hands-on deployment of OpenClaw / NetClaw against a real topology. It's aimed at engineers who've already built or used an MCP server and are ready to push past demos into something operationally safe. Link: lnkd.in/eSm36Xya Use code JOHN40 for a discount. Hope to see you there.

After the first cohort of Build Intelligent Networks with AI, one thing became really clear: the people are hungry for AI knowledge and hands on skills. They are showing ready to learn. They want to know how to make agents actually hold up inside a real network. So @MacroEngineered and I rebuilt the workshop around exactly that. Build Intelligent Networks with AI — Cohort 2 Hosted by @PacktPublishing. 4 hours, live, hands-on. This one goes deeper into the engineering side of agentic AI for networking: – Moving from raw MCP tools to structured, composable skills – Spec-driven development as a discipline for controlling agent behavior (not a prompt trick) – Designing agentic loops that know when they're stuck and hand back control safely – A deep dive into OpenClaw and NetClaw as production-ready frameworks for network agent workflows Will takes the first half on skills and spec-driven development. I take the second half on agentic loops and a hands-on deployment of OpenClaw / NetClaw against a real topology. It's aimed at engineers who've already built or used an MCP server and are ready to push past demos into something operationally safe. Link: eventbrite.co.uk/e/build-int… Use code JOHN40 for a discount. Hope to see you there.

🏆 We won the Hackathon for MCP & AI Agents 2026! The @Itential Hackathon Team is incredibly proud to share that our kagent_vision project took home first place in the MCP & AI Agents Starter Track at MCP_HACK//26. Knowing that our submission was reviewed by a panel like Kelsey Hightower, Chris Aniszczyk (CTO, CNCF), Alan Blount (Google ADK), Nathan Taber (NVIDIA DGX Cloud), Carlos Santana (AWS), Keith Mattix II (Microsoft), my good friend @SebbyCorp , Lin Sun, Christian Posta, Dmytro Rashko, and Michael Levan — and being recognized by them — is humbling in the best way. This is a panel that has, quite literally, written the books on cloud-native and agentic AI. What made this win special was the how: this wasn't a one-person sprint. The Itential Hackathon Team collaborated tightly across engineering, product, and design to get kagent_vision across the line — late-night debugging sessions, whiteboard architecture battles, and the kind of "let's just try it" energy that only the best teams have. Every commit had a fingerprint on it. 🔓 And the best part — kagent_vision is fully open source. It's a kagent Agent with Vision: capture photos, transform them with Nano Banana, animate them with Veo3 — and yes, it supports ASL. You can clone it, run it, break it, extend it. The whole point of MCP is composability, and we want builders to take this and run with it. 👉 Repo: lnkd.in/dtD46m9F 👉 Hackathon: aihackathon.dev/ Huge thanks to solo.io and the entire MCP_HACK//26 organizing crew for putting on a world-class event, and to the global MCP community for being one of the most exciting places to build right now. And a huge thanks to Jessica Newland @AutomateIP Ankit Bhansali @MacroEngineered @KristenHRachels Holly Holcomb Jesse Ford Peter Sprygada for being part of the hackathon team ! As a team we have agreed to donate 100% of the $1000 prize to the Atlanta Humane Society. Ultimately the Vision Agent prize will go to helping the dogs and cats of Atlanta. For this, I am even more proud. #MCP #AIAgents #OpenSource #Hackathon #Itential #CloudNative #AgenticAI #kagent lnkd.in/d7cM8eGS