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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?
#32A2A solves the problem of independently developed agents talking to each other. The bigger problem is "how do i trust your agent works?", which would be solved by having a believable system of Agent Evals, so I could test that your Agent actually does what it says on the box. Otherwise an Agent Directory and automatic dispatch of agents is close to useless.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#33If you're big in the google ecosystem it makes sense:
- gemini-cli can have remote a2a agents connected to it. (See https://github.com/tanaikech/gemini-cli-gas-a2a-subagents and the medium article linked in that repo description.) Haven't tried it but I tried the local use case below.
- can expose a custom Google ADK "agent" via one-liner as a2a, which you can connect to the gemini-cli the same way.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#34All of this protocol crap is a distraction. What's important is allowing agents talk to each other in their current scope and ACLs, including for their ability to talk to and discover tools. When Anthropic decided MCP was a good idea and published what they did, I ranted for days. Ok, I'm still ranting.
Now, discovery is important and there is a post right now on the front page about it. But what everyone is probably missing is that a) agents with tokens and services that honor those tokens is already handled well with HTTP. Fun fact, the original HTTP protocol (does anyone do RFCs anymore?) didn't support POSTs! So, most calls can be boiled down to doing a GET request somewhere with a token the remote end understands. Layer on SSL to hide the ? parameters, assuming it's easy to get certs mapped to your house network.
Discovery can be handled a bunch of different ways but given the nature of where the agents are running, it can be DIFFICULT to connect them (hole poking comes to mind). Of course you could run stuff in the cloud. But, if you care about sovereignty, you probably want to avoid anything that will "lock" you into a service (or a single agent/model for that matter).
What's 100% missing is payments, of course. Meet the 402, PAYMENT REQUIRED. Cloudflare (grumble) has something for that, but they stole it from Lightning Lab's very own roasbeef's Aperture project a while back, which implements payments with the Lightning network.
Make a bulk payment to a Bitcoin address. Stuff it in a Lightning invoice, send it to someone, they extract it and update the server to let you in. If you decided they ripped you off, close the invoice and the funds are refunded.
Now, I know a lot of people are skeptical about Bitcoin, but I really do think micropayments are useful for agent-to-agent comms. That's why I threw down the idea on a page about two years ago...so I wouldn't' forget: https://ahp.nuts.services/
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#35Yes! Although I've created a number of open-source A2A packages (https://github.com/a2anet) so I'm a little biased. For a more objective view, I keep an eye on the A2A SDK's monthly downloads (https://pypistats.org/packages/a2a-sdk). They're at ~10.9M compared to MCP's 257M, so MCP is downloaded about 24x more than A2A.
A2A is much more popular in enterprise than startups. All of the cloud providers and enterprise orchestration platforms (e.g. Gemini Enterprise, AgentForce, watsonx Orchestrate, SAP Joule) support it. People in enterprise typically make their agents A2A compatible so they can use them on these platforms, share them with other teams, etc.
The startups that I have seen use A2A typically use it for at least one of the following reasons:
1. To standardise their API endpoints. A2A specifies how to send and receive text, data, and files, so they can write client code once and reuse it with different agent frameworks. 2. To standardise agent cataloging. A2A introduces the concept of an Agent Card which contains information about the agent like its name, description, skills, accepted input, etc. 3. For long-running tasks. A2A was explicitly designed for long-running tasks and supports polling, streaming, and webhooks.
Confusingly, none of the above use cases are necessarily agent-to-agent. Turns out to standardise agent-to-agent communication, discovery, and authentication, you need to standardise agent communication, discovery, and authentication.
The A2A protocol is a good (not perfect) solution for agent-to-agent communication and it will continue to grow. How much it grows depends on how agents evolve. At the moment companies are building MCP servers for coding agents and chatbots, but not agents themselves. I believe that companies will eventually start building agents to control and improve their customer's experience. If they do this, A2A is the natural choice because it solves all of the problems associated with discovering, connecting, and communicating with agents over the internet.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#36If you're big in the google ecosystem it makes sense: - gemini-cli can have remote a2a agents connected to it. (See https://github.com/tanaikech/gemini-cli-gas-a2a-subagents and the medium article linked in that repo description.) Haven't tried it but I tried the local use case below. - can expose a custom Google ADK "agent" via one-liner as a2a, which you can connect to the gemini-cli the same way.
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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#37If you're big in the google ecosystem it makes sense: - gemini-cli can have remote a2a agents connected to it. (See https://github.com/tanaikech/gemini-cli-gas-a2a-subagents and the medium article linked in that repo description.) Haven't tried it but I tried the local use case below. - can expose a custom Google ADK "agent" via one-liner as a2a, which you can connect to the gemini-cli the same way.
Gemini CLI is deprecated and replaced by antigravity-cli
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#38[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#39Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using the A2A protocol?
#40[deleted]