There are plenty of engineers in Sri Lanka building with agents right now. Some of them work on it at WSO2 or at a product company with customers abroad. Some are doing it inside a team that has not told anyone yet. A fair number are doing it alone, in the evenings, with no idea whether the problem they are stuck on is hard or whether they have missed something obvious.
What has been missing is not talent or interest. It is a room.
The gap
Sri Lanka has a real software industry and a real habit of technical community. What it has had less of is a direct line to the places where the agent stack is being decided.
That gap shows up as a delay. A protocol is argued over in a working group, settles, ships, gets adopted, and reaches us as a finished thing to integrate against. By then the decisions that mattered are eighteen months old and there was nobody in the room with a Sri Lankan use case in mind.
The delay is not anybody's fault, and it is also not necessary. The working groups are open. The specifications are on GitHub. The calls are public. The only real barrier is that reading a spec alone, with no one to check your understanding against, is miserable, and most people stop.
Which is the actual argument for a chapter. Not access. Company.
What a chapter is
The Agentic AI Foundation appoints ambassadors, and its first cohort spans 138 people across 41 countries. Ayesha Dissanayaka is Sri Lanka's, and that is where this started.
In practice a chapter is a small number of volunteers who commit to putting on events, keeping them free, and keeping them technical. Three of us run this one:
- Ayesha Dissanayaka, AAIF Ambassador, and an architect at WSO2.
- Nimesha Jinarajadasa, DevOps solutions architect at KodeKloud.
- Kaveesha Gimhana, senior software engineer at Care Hires.
All volunteers, all with day jobs. Three people can start a chapter. Three people cannot be a chapter, which is the honest version of every "get involved" link on this site.
We are a community chapter rather than an official channel of the foundation. We run under its name and its Code of Conduct, and the views at our events belong to whoever is speaking.
What we are optimising for
Three things, and we would rather say them now so you can hold us to them.
Practitioners, not pitch decks. Every session should come from someone who shipped the thing. Real architectures, real failure modes, real numbers, including the parts that did not work. We do not sell speaking slots, so sponsorship never buys stage time.
Open standards over lock-in. The interfaces are being written right now. We would rather Sri Lankan engineers help write them than integrate against them years later.
A path to contributing. Meetups are the front door, not the point. The point is what comes after: a first pull request, a comment on a spec, eventually maintaining something other people depend on. If a year of this produces a good crowd and no contributors, we will have failed at the part we care about.
The first meetup
Friday 28 August, 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM, at the Hatch Auditorium in Colombo. Free to attend.
The theme is how agents are actually built and run in production: the open standards behind them, the tooling that makes them reliable, and where a newcomer can realistically start contributing. Two talks, a panel, and enough time afterwards to actually talk to people, which for most attendees is the part that pays for the evening.
Come if you are building with agents and want to compare notes. Come if you are curious and have built nothing. Nobody is going to check.
Details and registration are on the events page.
Three ways in
- Speak. Twenty minutes on something you built, or something you broke instructively. First-time speakers are welcome and we will help you shape the talk. Propose one.
- Host or sponsor. Venues and food are the only real limit on how often we can run events. Here is what sponsoring involves.
- Just turn up. Genuinely enough. The room is the thing we are building.