Protocols & Interoperability

Tool calling, structured outputs, MCP, and how agents talk to each other

• Function Calling Deep Dive: The Wire Under Tool Use — The mechanics beneath every agent framework: how you declare tools, what a structured tool call actually contains, why arguments are text you must parse and validate, how results get keyed back to a call id, and where the provider dialects differ. (5 lessons, 45 min)
• Structured Outputs: Getting Data, Not Prose — How to make a model hand your code data instead of paragraphs — the enforcement ladder from prompt-and-pray to schema-constrained decoding, why you validate at the boundary even when decoding is constrained, the retry ladder for when garbage arrives anyway, and schema design as error prevention. (5 lessons, 40 min)
• MCP Fundamentals: One Protocol Instead of M × N Integrations — The Model Context Protocol from the spec up: why M clients × N integrations collapses into one open standard, the host/client/server architecture, the tools–resources–prompts primitives, stdio and Streamable HTTP, and the trust model that makes installing a server a decision about code you run. (5 lessons, 45 min)
• Building with MCP: Servers, Clients, and the Install Review — The engineering side of MCP — what a server actually declares, how a client discovers and calls it, where the OAuth story really stands, how to test a server, and the review you owe yourself before installing somebody else’s. (5 lessons, 45 min)
• Tool Selection at Scale: Forty Tools, One Context — What changes when an agent has forty tools instead of six: choosing a loadout every turn, retrieval-based tool selection and its silent failure mode, namespacing across a dozen MCP servers, reading mis-selection in a trace, and the point where you split the agent instead of filtering the list. (5 lessons, 45 min)
• A2A and Agent Interop — Honestly Sized — What the Agent2Agent protocol actually specifies — agent cards, tasks, artifacts, three bindings — who verifiably ships it, and the architect’s question that comes first: are you crossing a real organisational boundary, or building a supervisor-worker system inside one stack? (5 lessons, 40 min)
• Sessions and Streaming: The Conversation Plumbing — The four nouns every agent platform reinvents — session, message, run, step — plus the two streams an agent UI needs (tokens and events), what it takes to reconnect to a long run without double-charging a customer, and the one decision that follows you forever: who stores the transcript, you or the platform. (5 lessons, 40 min)