Field notes from Spring I/O 2026 in Barcelona, where AI agents dominated the agenda. Roughly a third of main-track sessions covered Spring AI, MCP, and LLM-based agents. Rod Johnson toured with his Embabel talk on building AI agents on Spring. Migration and Spring Boot 4 internals sessions were present but off the main stage. The author's key takeaway: the Spring ecosystem is shifting from a web framework to an agent platform, and that shift will accelerate through 2026.
Table of contents
Agents everywhereRod Johnson on the roadThe sessions that didn't get the main stageA few things from the HeroDevs cornerThe documentaryWhat I'm taking homeSort: