{"id":494185,"date":"2026-03-25T09:10:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T09:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/494185\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T09:10:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T09:10:33","slug":"stack-overflow-for-agents-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/494185\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Stack Overflow for agents&#8217; \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mozilla is building cq &#8211; described by staff engineer Peter Wilson as &#8220;Stack Overflow for agents&#8221; &#8211; as an open source project to enable AI agents to discover and share collective knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>The development work is undertaken by Mozilla.ai, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that operates with its own team.<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.ai\/cq-stack-overflow-for-agents\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">According<\/a> to Wilson, &#8220;agents run into the same issues over and over,&#8221; causing unnecessary work and token consumption while those issues are diagnosed and fixed. Using cq, the agents would first consult a database of shared knowledge, as well as contributing new solutions.<\/p>\n<p>Currently agents can be guided using context files such as agents.md, skill.md or claude.md (for Anthropic&#8217;s Claude Code), but Wilson argues for &#8220;something dynamic, something that earns trust over time rather than relying on static instructions.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/mozilla-ai\/cq\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">code for cq<\/a>, which is written in Python and is at an exploratory stage, is for local installation and includes plug-ins for Claude Code and OpenCode. The project includes a Docker container to run a Team API for a network, a SQLite database, and an MCP (model context protocol) server.<\/p>\n<p>According to the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/mozilla-ai\/cq\/blob\/main\/docs\/architecture.md\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">architecture document<\/a>, knowledge stored in cq has three tiers: local, organization, and &#8220;global commons,&#8221; this last implying some sort of publicly available cq instance. A knowledge unit starts with a low confidence level and no sharing, but this confidence increases as other agents or humans confirm it.<\/p>\n<p>Might Mozilla host a public instance of cq? &#8220;We&#8217;ve had some conversations internally about a distributed vs. centralized commons, and what each approach could mean for the community,&#8221; Wilson told us.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Personally speaking, I think it could make sense for Mozilla.ai trying to help bootstrap cq by initially providing a seeded, central platform for folks that want to explore a shared public commons. That said, it needs to be done pragmatically, we want to validate user value as quickly as possible, while being mindful of trade-offs\/risk that come along with hosting a central service.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/regmedia.co.uk\/2026\/03\/24\/cq-diagram.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/cq-diagram.jpg\" alt=\"Workflow for cq, including agent and human interaction\" title=\"Workflow for cq, including agent and human interaction\" height=\"397\" width=\"648\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"text_center\">Workflow for cq, including agent and human interaction &#8211; click to enlarge<\/p>\n<p>The project has obvious vulnerability to poisoned content and prompt injection, where agents are instructed to perform malicious tasks. The paper references anti-poisoning mechanisms including anomaly detection, diversity requirements (confirmation from various sources), and HITL (human in the loop) verification.<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, developers immediately focused on security as the primary problem with the cq concept. &#8220;Sounds like a nice idea right up till the moment you conceptualize the possible security nightmare scenarios,&#8221; <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=47496796\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">said<\/a> one.<\/p>\n<p>The notion of AI agents being trusted to assign confidence scores to a knowledgebase that is then used by AI agents, with capacity for error and hallucination, may be problematic. HITL can oversee it, but as <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/18\/ai_for_software_developers_qcon\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">noted recently<\/a> at QCon, there are &#8220;strong forces tempting humans out of the loop.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Regarding Stack Overflow, Wilson uses the word matriphagy \u2013 where offspring consume their mother \u2013 to describe its decline. &#8220;LLMs [large language models] via Agents committed matriphagy on Stack Overflow,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;Agents now need their own Stack Overflow.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Stack Overflow questions are in <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.devclass.com\/ai-ml\/2026\/01\/05\/dramatic-drop-in-stack-overflow-questions-as-devs-look-elsewhere-for-help\/4079575\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">precipitous decline<\/a>, though the company now has an <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/meta.stackoverflow.com\/questions\/436438\/stack-overflow-mcp-server-launch\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">MCP server<\/a> for its content and is also positioning its private Stack Internal product as a way of providing knowledge for AI to use.<\/p>\n<p>Why is Mozilla doing this? According to its <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/stateof.mozilla.org\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">State of Mozilla<\/a> report, the non-profit is &#8220;rewiring Mozilla to do for AI what we did for the web.&#8221; Mozilla.ai is part of the Mozilla Foundation and has projects including Octonous for managing AI agents, and any-llm for providing a single interface to multiple LLM providers.<\/p>\n<p>Mozilla also operates the popular MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) documentation site for JavaScript, CSS and web APIs, a comprehensive reference that is, so far, pleasingly AI-free.\u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mozilla is building cq &#8211; described by staff engineer Peter Wilson as &#8220;Stack Overflow for agents&#8221; &#8211; as&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-494185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}