Guide

If you’ve also been using AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, you’ve probably noticed a flood of new terms around the agentic stack — MCP, Skills, Hooks, AGENTS.md, context engineering. It’s a lot. And if you’re like me, you want to understand what each thing actually does before adopting it. After working with them for a while and creating a few of them custom myself, I’ve got some understanding, and here’s the deal: these aren’t just buzzwords. They’re distinct primitives that solve different problems, and together they form an emerging “agentic stack”. ...

What is OAuth? OAuth is an open standard for access delegation. It allows a user to grant a third-party application limited access to their resources (e.g., Google Photos, GitHub repositories) without sharing their credentials (username and password). Instead, OAuth uses tokens to securely manage access. OAuth 1.0: Launched in 2007, it used a signature-based system. It’s now largely obsolete. OAuth 2.0: Introduced in 2012 via RFC 6749, it’s a simpler, more flexible redesign and the focus of this guide. Why Use OAuth? Imagine you want a photo-editing app to access your Google Photos. Without OAuth, you’d share your Google password—risky! OAuth lets you authorize the app to access only your photos, for a limited time, without exposing your credentials. ...