Next Moca Releases Agent Definition Language as an Open Source Specification

Izzo If you're shipping AI agents to production, you've probably hit the same wall everyone else has.

Izzo Welcome back to Exploring Next, episode one seventy-five. I'm here with Boone, and today we're talking about something that might actually solve a real problem — Next Moca just open-sourced Agent Definition Language, or ADL.

Boone And Izzo, this is one of those infrastructure pieces that sounds boring but could be huge. Think OpenAPI but for AI agents.

Izzo Exactly. Because right now, if I ask you 'what can this agent actually do?' — good luck figuring that out. The behavior's spread across prompts, code, config files, and a bunch of undocumented assumptions.

Boone Right, and that's a nightmare for any kind of governance or security review. I've seen teams spend weeks just trying to audit what tools an agent has access to.

Izzo So ADL is trying to be that missing definition layer. You get a single, declarative spec that says what an agent is, what tools it can call, what data it can touch.

Boone The architecture here is actually pretty clean. It's framework-agnostic — they're not trying to compete with your execution layer. This is purely about the definition.

Izzo Which is smart positioning. They're not saying 'rip out your agent framework.' They're saying 'here's how you describe what you built so other people can understand it.'

Boone And the spec covers all the stuff you actually need — agent identity, role, language model configuration, tools, permissions, RAG data access, dependencies. Plus governance metadata like ownership and version history.

Izzo That governance piece is huge for production systems. I can define an agent once, validate it locally, then share that same definition with security, platform, and compliance teams.

Boone The validation tooling is key here. They've got a published JSON Schema, so you can catch definition errors in CI before they hit production.

Izzo And Boone, this addresses something I see all the time — teams building these autonomous agents with tool access, but no clear way to compare capabilities or manage rollbacks when something goes wrong.

Boone Yeah, and the portability story is compelling. If I define an agent in ADL, theoretically I can move it between platforms without rewriting everything from scratch.

Izzo The timing makes sense too. We're seeing agents move from experiments to production components, and you need software-style lifecycle management at that point.

Boone What I like is they're being realistic about scope. ADL doesn't handle agent communication, runtime tool invocation, or message transport. It's focused on doing one thing well.

Izzo Right, it's meant to complement existing tech like A2A, MCP, OpenAPI. Not replace everything.

Boone Though I'm curious how this plays with the existing agent frameworks. The success really depends on adoption across the ecosystem.

Izzo True, but they're taking the right approach — Apache 2.0 license, open governance, inviting community contributions. They want this to be a neutral standard, not a vendor lock-in play.

Boone And honestly, the problem is real enough that I think people will adopt it if the tooling is good. The fragmentation pain is hitting everyone building production agents.

Izzo Plus they've got the basics right out of the gate — JSON Schema, example definitions, validation tools, contribution guidelines. It's not just a spec document.

Boone Alright, so what should people actually go build with this? First, check out the ADL repository on GitHub — they've got examples and documentation to get you started.

Izzo Try converting one of your existing agents to an ADL definition. See how it feels to have everything in one declarative format instead of scattered across your codebase.

Boone And if you're feeling ambitious, build some tooling around it — maybe an editor, a registry, or testing tools. This is early enough that there's room to shape the ecosystem.

Boone I might actually add this to my weekend project list — build a simple ADL validator that plugs into our CI pipeline.

Izzo There's the Boone we know. But seriously, if you're shipping agents to production, this is worth a look. Definition standards tend to win when the pain is real enough.

Izzo That's it for this episode of Exploring Next. The infrastructure layers might not be flashy, but they're what make the flashy stuff actually work in production.