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Richard MacManus

I’m a strategist and analyst focused on the Agentic Web: how AI agents discover, understand, and interact with websites and digital products. Previously I founded ReadWriteWeb, an influential Web 2.0 blog.

Welcome, Humans and Bots, to the Agentic Web

This week I have been looking closely at how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been moving to integrate AI into the web platform. In my analysis for The New Stack, I looked at a W3C group called the AI Agent Protocol Community Group, whose co-chairs (both from

How Cloudflare Is Both AI Police and AI Booster

This week I'm looking at some of the moves Cloudflare has been making to help web publishers and content creators deal with AI companies that "leverage" (to put it politely) open web content. I spoke to a Cloudflare exec for a reported story on The New

The Fate of the Web in the AI Era

I've been pondering what the fate of the Web will be as we continue to progress into the AI era. I've been wondering if the web is going to survive the AI onslaught — to put it more plainly. On the technology side, I think the web

Web UIs in Agents: An Interview with MCP-UI Creators

For my post on The New Stack this week, I interviewed the two creators of MCP-UI, an open source project that creates React or web components for agents. The technology is just 3 months old, but is already being used by Shopify and others. One of the founders, Ido

GPT-5 Drama: Less Reliance on JavaScript and React?

GPT-5 reaction amongst developers over the past week has been...mixed. In fact, one of the developers OpenAI featured on its launch-day promotions (Theo Browne) has done a complete 180 — he now says he was wrong about GPT-5! Questions of coding quality aside, GPT-5 raises some

OpenAI Releases GPT-5 and Why Barndoor is APIs 2.0

This week I interviewed Oren Michels, who ran API company Mashery in Web 2.0 (a long-time ReadWriteWeb sponsor!). He's back now with a modern twist on API management: Barndoor, a control plane for agentic AI. "If you take APIs and you take the ‘P’ out,