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Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?

#42

Post by h4kunamata »

A2A when MCP is not even adopted properly.

MCP makes things so much easier and faster to release updates/tools to an agent. Yet, not many services support it or support it properly.

I had to write a Claude skill to use API because the service didn't have the MCP tool for that operation.

A2A will be just more of the same. Everything about AI is a work in progress hoping something will work.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?

#44

Post by holografix »

A2A Protocol is directed at enterprises as is much of Google Cloud’s AI focus. They just renamed their AI suite “Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform” if you don’t believe me.

Enterprises have been sold on the idea of Agents talking to each other and performing collaborative work (replacing employees etc) so it makes sense.

From my pov nothing stops me from having a full blown agent _behind_ my MCP server.

So calling agent sees and MCP server, gets list of tools etc. The MCP server spins up an instance of relevant Agent and tells it to maintain state (if needed) as a key back to the calling agent’s MCP session_id.

Trivial stuff on Cloudflare

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?

#45

Post by ithkuil »

simonreiff wrote: post #25

AI infrastructure/tools developer here (www.hic-ai.com). I considered the A2A protocol carefully, but I decided a while ago that, from my perspective, the A2A protocol was not solving the correct problem. There is no distinction (from the perspective of an agent) between a communication from Agent A to Agent B, on the one hand, and a communication from Agent A to "future Agent A", on the other. In fact, agents have n…

We wouldn't have identities either if we were all clones and our memories could be edited and shuffled at each conversation.

For an agent to have an identity we would have to intentionally make it hard to context engineering and limit it to append only messages that mimick human communication.

I can implant a thought into your head. If I say "Don't think about a green elephant" for a moment you'll think about a green elephant. There are more sophisticated examples of a person implanting thoughts in somobodies head (e.g. propaganda) but that's about it, I can't literally edit thoughts.

Why on earth do we want to limit our ability to do more powerful context engineering in a substrate that offers that ability natively?

Presumably because for some use cases you want the context of an agent to belong to a different "administrative domain" and you so want to have control over what information reaches it and how can it affect it?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?

#47

Post by reactordev »

chickensong wrote: post #30
reactordev wrote: post #9

Yes. My agent speaks A2A with itself and others. But my agent is built in layers like an organization.

Would love to hear more if you're interested in sharing.

.

                        - worker
                       |
                        - worker
                       |
    planner —- manager —- worker
                       |
                        - worker
                       |
                        - worker

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?

#48

Post by pfannl »

simonreiff wrote: post #25

AI infrastructure/tools developer here (www.hic-ai.com). I considered the A2A protocol carefully, but I decided a while ago that, from my perspective, the A2A protocol was not solving the correct problem. There is no distinction (from the perspective of an agent) between a communication from Agent A to Agent B, on the one hand, and a communication from Agent A to "future Agent A", on the other. In fact, agents have n…

Agent identity is just OAuth in a fake mustache. I suspect the real boundary is not agent-to-agent, but context + permissions + audit trail.
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