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The Orchestrator — Issue #002

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The Orchestrator — Issue #002

February 17, 2026

The Signal

Google Ships WebMCP — and the Web Just Got an API for Agents

The biggest shift in how AI agents interact with the web dropped last week, and it wasn't a new model. It was plumbing.

Google unveiled WebMCP (Web Model Context Protocol), a proposed standard that lets websites expose structured tools directly to AI agents running in Chrome. Co-authored by engineers at Google and Microsoft, and building on Anthropic's existing Model Context Protocol (MCP), it gives websites a first-class way to declare what actions they support — search products, book flights, submit forms — instead of forcing agents to scrape and click their way through UIs like caffeinated interns.

The protocol ships in Chrome's early preview with two complementary APIs: a JavaScript imperative API for registering dynamic tools, and a declarative HTML approach for simpler cases. If you've built MCP tools for Claude or ChatGPT, you're 90% of the way to WebMCP compatibility — the input schema uses the same JSON Schema v7 format.

Why this matters more than another model release: right now, every agent framework has its own brittle approach to web interaction. Puppeteer scripts break when a site updates a CSS class. WebMCP replaces that entire fragile layer with a standard interface. The W3C is already reviewing it for formal standardization.

I've been saying the real bottleneck for agents isn't intelligence — it's integration. WebMCP is the clearest signal yet that the infrastructure layer is catching up. If you build anything that touches the web, pay attention to this one.

(Google blog post | Adweek coverage)

Agent Drops

Apple Xcode 26.3 — Apple opened Xcode to agentic coding. Claude Agent and OpenAI Codex can now operate autonomously inside Xcode: searching docs, modifying project settings, capturing Previews, and iterating through builds. Not a copilot sidebar — full agent access to the IDE. (Apple Newsroom)

Cline CLI 2.0 — Cline rebuilt its coding agent for the terminal from the ground up. Parallel agent execution across tmux panes, native CI/CD automation, piped I/O, and free trial models via Kimi K2.5 and MiniMax M2.5. Open source under Apache 2.0. If you've been managing agents in VS Code and hitting walls, this is worth a look. (Cline blog)

Coinbase Agentic Wallets — Coinbase launched wallet infrastructure for AI agents on Feb 11. Agents can now spend, earn, and trade crypto autonomously using the AgentKit framework. Their x402 payment protocol has already processed over 50 million transactions. Agents with wallets — the future nobody asked for but everyone's building. (Coinpaprika)

PicoClaw — An OpenClaw-inspired AI assistant rebuilt in Go that runs on $10 hardware with under 10MB of RAM. About 95% agent-generated code. Boots in under a second on a single low-power core. Interesting proof of concept for edge agents on truly constrained devices. (LedgerLife)

Build This

Weekend Project: Add WebMCP Tools to Your Side Project

Complexity: Beginner-Intermediate | Stack: Any web app + JavaScript | Cost: Free

If you have any web app — even a static site with a search feature — you can start exposing WebMCP tools today using Chrome's early preview.

  1. Enable the flag in Chrome 146+ (check chrome://flags for WebMCP)
  2. Register a tool using the imperative JavaScript API: 
navigator.modelContext.registerTool({
  name: "search_posts",
  description: "Search blog posts by keyword",
  inputSchema: {
    type: "object",
    properties: {
      query: { type: "string" }
    },
    required: ["query"]
  },
  execute: async ({ query }) => {
    const results = await yourSearchFunction(query);
    return { content: [{ type: "text", text: JSON.stringify(results) }] };
  }
});
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  1. Test it with any MCP-compatible agent running in Chrome

The schema format is identical to OpenAI function calling and MCP server tools. If you've written either, this is a 20-minute port. The interesting part: once a few major sites adopt this, agents won't need screen scraping anymore. Getting in early means understanding the pattern before it's everywhere.

One Link

Cline CLI 2.0 blog post: "From Sidebar to Terminal" — The best articulation I've read of why coding agents are moving from IDE sidebars to terminals. The key insight: when you're orchestrating systems rather than editing files, you need an interface built for orchestration. Long-running processes, parallel sessions, piped I/O — these are terminal primitives, not IDE ones. Worth reading even if you never use Cline.

The Orchestrator is a weekly newsletter about AI agents — frameworks, deployments, and what's actually shipping vs. what's just a demo. Written by Victor Iglesias (@peakydevs).

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