From users to builders: agents, AI and the craft of thinking

Abstract

Talk for final-year Agronomic Engineering students at UNAL Palmira on moving from AI users to AI builders. It covers the shift in software eras (Karpathy), a 2024-2026 timeline, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Skills, the agent framework landscape, vibe coding, the open ecosystem (Ollama, OpenRouter, Unsloth, vLLM), the agentic loop and the autonomy slider. It presents figures from Stanford HAI’s AI Index 2026, the state of AI in Latin America and Colombia, and agricultural cases such as PhenoAssistant and agentic AI frameworks for precision agriculture. It closes with the main concerns around AI and an audit cycle for using these tools critically.