Transcript: wasmCloud v2 RC5: wash new, the Wasm Component Model & Agentic AI
wasmCloud Weekly Community Call — Wed, Dec 17, 2025 · 16 minutes
Speakers: Liam Randall, Eric Gregory, Aditya, Lucas Fontes, Jeremy Fleitz
Transcript
Liam Randall 04:40
Okay, everybody, welcome to wasmCloud Wednesday for Wednesday, December the 17th, 2025. I'm happy to be here today with Eric and a small group of community folks who are still here in December with the plague running around. Let me get the meeting agenda shared and we can get started.
So right now in the community, we're in the midst of testing out RC5 for CNCF wasmCloud, which means new features, new docs, new consistency. This week we're going to get started with Eric, if you want to give us a tour of some of the new docs that reflect some of the internal consistency changes we've been making for wasmCloud. Are you going to share your screen?
Eric Gregory 05:26
Absolutely, yeah, I'll share my screen.
Liam Randall 05:29
I'm going to need to give you privileges.
Jeremy Fleitz 05:35
There you are.
Eric Gregory 05:37
Hey, I've got the power. All right.
So like Liam said, wash RC5 — Release Candidate 5 — is out in the world now, and there are a couple of things we want to flag here. First, as Liam was saying, Lucas and Bailey have been doing a lot of work to refine the consistency in the way we use different flags and arguments, making sure that a term means what you would expect it to mean when we use it. We've been updating the command reference in the docs accordingly, and we'll take a look at that in a moment.
But the big thing I want to flag — that I think some users could stub their toe on — is the way wash new works. As we have here in this comment from Bailey on this PR, to reduce the scope for our MVP of wash v2.0 (and this is reflected in RC5), we're removing the templating feature until we can implement and test it in a really fleshed-out way. So the way wash new works right now in RC5 is that it grabs an example repo at a Git reference and clones that down, and you can use it as your starting point. Whereas you might previously have typed wash new and gone through the little CLI wizard to walk through which language you're going to use, et cetera, now you pull down something directly from a repo.
What that looks like in the updated command reference is wash new and then the Git repository URL to use effectively as a project template. Then you can use the --git-ref flag to adjust that reference with a branch, tag, or commit to check out, and the --name flag to define the project name and local directory you want to create.
So this has entailed some updates to our Developer Guide, which walks you through using wash new. Let's run through the process quickly for a Rust project to see what it looks like. We're going to run wash new, pointing to this Git URL, using the --name flag "hello" so our project is called "hello," and pointing to the subfolder examples/http/hello-world, because this example is housed in the wash Git repo. We'll run that — it's going to clone our project down.
Liam Randall 08:28
Eric, we can only see your browser. We don't see your CLI.
Eric Gregory 08:33
Oh, no — thank you for letting me know. Let me share the entire screen. Can you see my CLI now? Great.
So you can see we ran wash new pointing to the Git URL, name "hello," subfolder examples/http/hello-world. We cloned that down, we've got our hello directory, and it's got everything you would expect — or maybe not everything you would expect, because we've gone ahead and updated our Rust hello world example as well, which is worth pointing out.
So we're now using the wstd Rust standard library for Wasm components, in an effort to be as ecosystem-aligned and centralized as possible. Let's take a look at that example. You can see here we're now working with a couple of simple async functions getting our "Hello from wasmCloud" response. And if we go over and run wash dev…
Eric Gregory 10:06
"Hello from wasmCloud." So this is our slightly revamped beginning Developer Guide experience with RC5. If you want to go kick the tires on this, experiment with a particular component example that you want to pull down and work with — we'd definitely love that, and love to hear from you. That's about what we've got for the moment. Back to you.
Liam Randall 10:34
Okay, Eric, thank you so much. A few community things to highlight this week, and then we're going to call it a short meeting — everybody's likely busy with holiday things.
The Linux Foundation announced the creation of a new Agentic AI Foundation, which is hosting three new projects. The first is the Model Context Protocol itself — MCP, as a standard, has now been donated from Anthropic to the AI Foundation. Goose, which is a front end and platform for interfacing with and building solutions around LLMs from Block, is donated. And the agents.md standard.
I highlight that in the CNCF wasmCloud community because one of the things we see a number of folks working with is the sandboxing of MCP components that have been open-sourced and are in the ecosystem. Anthropic put out a great blog that talked about the incredible growth of MCP and the growing adoption. As the last call-out, I'd point people back to Sandbox MCP for examples and walkthroughs of how to use this free framework for building MCP servers.
The reason this is such a good fit is that what it's addressing is the non-deterministic I/O of LLMs, which creates a whole set of opportunities and a whole set of problems that need to be addressed — such as prompt injection, remote code execution, lateral movement, and ultimately data exfiltration. So with that, maybe we'll open it up to anybody in the community who might want to add anything, or any questions or discussion items we'd want to chat about today.
Liam Randall 12:40
Let's see — there's a note in chat about the wasmCloud TOML. Eric, do you want to answer that one verbally, if you don't mind?
Eric Gregory 12:49
Sure thing. So Aditya had the question: "I don't see the wasmcloud.toml — is that retconned, or would that be included in the cargo.toml now?" It's a great thing to call out. In wash v1, in a template especially, you would probably have a wasmcloud.toml file setting configuration for your project. In version 2.0, config is something that is in the process of being revamped right now as we speak, but at the moment there is no v1-style wasmcloud.toml. What you'll find in the .wash subdirectory right now is a config.json. But I want to note for everyone that that is definitely going to undergo some major changes — it's going to look a little different, and we'll actually have multiple formats that users will be able to work with. So stay tuned; that's something we'll be speaking to in the coming weeks.
Liam Randall 13:35
Yeah, and we have been doing a ton of internal smoothing and polishing on the RC series. Lucas and Bailey especially have really done yeoman's work, if you're in on the commits. And I know there are some incredible community committers who have just been sending us stuff that has been phenomenal. I'd love to call a few of you out — I think one contributor has had five commits land in the last couple of weeks. DJ, obviously you're a huge committer, along with the team over at Betty Blocks. We really appreciate it, and we aspire to and love building better together.
So with that, we're going to wrap it up this week. Next week — what's that, the 24th? That's Christmas Eve, isn't it? Is that when next week's meeting would be? Yes. We're going to cancel that. Nobody's coming in on Christmas Eve. I love WebAssembly, but I don't think anybody wants to be on this call on Christmas Eve. We'll pick up the week after that, getting ready to roll right into 2026. So if we don't see anybody on Slack, we wish you all happy holidays, and we hope you have a great week. Cheers, everybody. Thank you.
Liam Randall 15:14
Hold the awkward smile until the live stream stops. Hopefully it's already stopped and that comment doesn't make it into the video. And I think we're done.
Eric Gregory 15:24
That'd be a great lesson.
Liam Randall 15:26
Yeah. Okay, well, thanks for being on today, everybody. Wish you guys all happy holidays, and we'll see you on Slack. Have a great day, everybody. Bye.