Every team I work with is suddenly shipping AI agents. The agents are the easy part. The hard part — the part I spent years solving for ordinary services — is the layer underneath: how does an agent built by one team get discovered, called, and governed by another, without everyone rebuilding the same plumbing and without security signing off on a free-for-all?
Blocks Network (from PubNub) pitches itself as exactly that substrate — a network for agent-to-agent communication with routing, discovery, presence and an economy layer. So instead of reading the marketing, I built on it. This is a field report from taking it from npm install to a live two-agent call, written for the four people who actually have to approve this kind of thing: the developer, the DevOps/platform engineer, the analyst/architect, and the security reviewer.
Everything below is what I observed on the real platform on a Linux box (Node v20.19.5, Blocks CLI 1.0.24). Where I couldn't verify something, I say so.
Continue reading “Building on Blocks Network — a hands-on field report on the “Internet of Agents””