Seems like over engineering just build an API in front of your agent, give the other agent the spec in a markdown file.
Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#12No, it was designed on paper by someone with no understanding of prompt caching and no consideration of latency or token costs
You mean Google doesn't understand prompt caching, latency or token costs? Or Google teams fail to communicate for such things?
A2A is a very high level protocol that's meant to be an entry point for the actual network protocols that allow agents to communicate with others like HTTP, gRPC, and others. The promise of no-code means the concept has to exist as an abstraction.
There's a Kaggle course going on where Google discusses A2A and their thoughts on it. If you're a pure vibe coder who doesn't know how to code, A2A is for you. If you know the basics of programming and could even do some web crawling, there are many accessible options.
Google and the industry is honing in on these vibe coders who will look at 10 million tokens consumed to make a checklist application and think nothing of it. The agent to agent (A2A) protocol is for them. Personally, I think it's useful to describe what I'm already doing to people who aren't experts.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#13I've changed my mind a few times on this, but given how substantial the adoption for MCP has been (Claude and OpenAI both use it for their native integrations) its only a matter of time before consolidation happens.
There's a way higher incentive to build an MCP server than an A2A one, and unless Google makes their default AI search a native A2A client it doesn't feel like it will get the momentum it needs to take off.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#14I uh…still use tmux send-keys. I’ll change as soon as I find a use-case it doesn’t solve. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#15(Based off 2-3 month-old recollection, take with a grain of salt)
I had wanted to use it for my agent "network". A2A didn't fit the use case of "trusted agent, and was bloated due to "what if rogue actor". Of course, I could have used it, with all of its roughness, but chose to just vibe my own (before Claude Teams, though I haven't really used that, I think). In the process of creating a server to handle this (I already set up a Scala webserver to administrate/orchestrate hooks). Would love to hear others' suggestions for this.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#16Seems like over engineering just build an API in front of your agent, give the other agent the spec in a markdown file.
why dropbox when you can just rsync
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#17I am using A2A at work. It's a bit like the "microservices architecture" for agents... Allows you or teams to develop agents independently and have them interact as and when they need to. No major hurdles so far.
This was my assumption. Agents will supersede services. There will be many companies way ahead of the curve and the rest of the industry will take 5-10 years to catch up.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#18I work at some megacorp and have direct insight about any ai use - nope, not a single use case i witnessed used a2a in the final product. I still don't get a2a but you probably have to work at Google or something to see this as the solution to something.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#19In the past 1 year, I think I've moved from MCP to A2A to Agent MCP back again. I have agents still talking to other Agents via A2A for some use cases, but for the most part, it's back to Agent MCP now; couple that with tool search/code mode (whatever you want to call it) in your Agentic AI harness, MCPs seem to be the way to go for now.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#20No, it was designed on paper by someone with no understanding of prompt caching and no consideration of latency or token costs
You mean Google doesn't understand prompt caching, latency or token costs? Or Google teams fail to communicate for such things?
This is kind of a loaded question.
"Google" doesn't understand anything, as it isn't one being. Google has also as many average employees as any other company, and they will also come up with bad, corporate, ideas.
Honestly the worst part about the LLM age is that everyone is suddenly an "expert", and that is why we get shitty things like A2A or MCP or whatever the next "shiny" overengineered thing is.
Just like with any new technology, people will crawl out the woodwork to establish "standards" just so they can claim fame, money and attention that comes with it.