Two teams running the identical Cursor or Claude Code installation can produce wildly different output; the gap almost always traces back to one thing. This part covers the extensibility layer: skills, subagents and Agent Teams, rules, MCP, the emerging ACP standard, plugins and hooks. Tool selection is a thirty-minute decision; building this layer is a six-month investment that compounds into a real competitive moat.

Here is my takeaway from attending the 89th conference of the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG 89).