Long thread published on X on **September 29, 2026** by **Ryan Sarver** (@rsarver), titled *"Personal AI Should Actually Be Personal"*; roughly **1,700 words**, 91.5k views at time of collection. Starting point: **Amazon** blocked **Muse** (**Meta**) from its shopping site, and users lost access to their shopping agent, *"a side effect of a dispute I had no say in."* **(A)** Definition: a personal AI must be **owned** (open source, data in controlled storage, portability), have **a single principal**, offer a readable contract and inspectable trade-offs, run wherever one chooses, and be pleasant to use. **(B)** Observation on the current landscape: Muse opts users into training by default, **Instinct** carries a *"perpetual and irrevocable"* license; estimated cost gap of **$3,000 to $7,000 per user per year** against $20 a month. **(C)** A reversal: the owned stack can end up better, because the user gives it *"every corner of your life."* **(D)** A five-layer stack (clients, harness and connectors, memory, two-tier models, machine) and a call to build a productized version of **OpenClaw**. Responds to **Brad Gerstner** on trust; extends the body of work on shopping agents and markdown memory.
#personal AI#personal AI#personal agent
Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) · auteur du fil sur X ; fonction non indiquée dans le texte.
Announcement from **Google** on **August 6, 2026**: Google joins as **Core Maintainer** the **Agent Plugins 1.0.0** specification, an open, *vendor-neutral* packaging format for distributing **Agent Skills** and **MCP servers** together. The specification was published by a **TSC** whose Core Maintainers come from **Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel**; Google joins them, represented by **Kevin Hou** (Senior Staff Engineer, Google DeepMind). The two packaged building blocks — Agent Skills and MCP — originate from **Anthropic**, which does not appear on this list of maintainers. **The diagnosis** fits in one sentence: *"The core problem isn't the components. It's the manifest."* A skill is portable, an MCP server is portable; the box they go in is not, and every client had to invent it for itself — hence the forks, the copies of identical components, and their drift. **The format** fits in one constraint: *"A plugin is a directory. That's the whole idea, and the restraint is the point."* A `plugin.json` with two useful lines (`$schema` and `name`), skills in `skills/` in the Agent Skills format, servers declared in `mcp.json` with an **explicit `type` on each entry** (stdio, Streamable HTTP, or the legacy HTTP+SSE) — no more transport guessed from the shape of the config object. The strength of the design lies in what the manifest **cannot** do: neither relocate components nor declare them inline, so there is no discovery path to configure and no precedence order to learn. Operational corollary: components **fail independently** — an `mcp.json` server that fails to start does not take down the plugin's skills, the client skips the entry, keeps going, and reports the failure. The accepted escape hatch is the **reverse-domain** directory (`com.example.client/`), an extension space owned entirely by one client (hooks, agents, commands) that other clients ignore: *"the portable core stays small because the non-portable parts have somewhere legitimate to go."* A section is dedicated to cases where the format is not warranted — *"Not every skill should be a Plugin"*: a single MCP server to a single client, `mcp.json` suffices; a single skill needs no plugin. What v1 explicitly excludes, under *future considerations*: **no installation mechanism, no distribution protocol, no permissions model, no sandboxing requirement, no trust or provenance verification, no UX**. All of this fits into an independently adoptable four-layer stack — **find** (Agentic Resource Discovery), **describe** (AI Catalog, which would register the `application/agent-plugins+json` type), **package** (Agent Plugins), **run** (MCP + Agent Skills). Two Google products already ship: **Agents CLI** and **Data Agent Kit** (BigQuery, Spanner, Cloud SQL).