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A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

a2ui.org

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Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#22

> A2UI lets agents send declarative component descriptions that clients render using their own native widgets. It's like having agents speak a universal UI language . (emphasis mine) Sounds like agents are suddenly able to do what developers have failed at for decades: Writing platform-independent UIs. Maybe this works for simple use cases but beyond that I'm skeptical.

It still needs language-specific libraries [1] (and no sveltekit even announced yet :( ).

[1] https://a2ui.org/renderers/

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#23
post #5

So there's MCP-UI, OpenAI's ChatKit widgets and now Google's A2UI, that I know of. And probably some more... How many more variants are we introducing to solve the same problem. Sounds like a lot of wasted manhours to me.

> Sounds like a lot of wasted manhours to me

Sounds like a lot of people got paid because of it. That's a win for them. It wasn't their decision, it was company decision to take part in the race. Most likely there will be more than 1 winner anyway.

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#24
post #17
post #14

> A2UI lets agents send declarative component descriptions that clients render using their own native widgets. It's like having agents speak a universal UI language. Why the hell would anyone want this? Why on earth would you trust an LLM to output a UI? You're just asking for security bugs, UI impersonation attacks, terrible usability, and more. This is a nightmare.

If done in chat , it's just an alternative to talking to you freeform. Consider Claude Code's multiple-choice questions, which you can trigger by asking it to invoke the right tool, for example.

None of the issues go away just because it's in chat?

Freeform looks and acts like text, except for a set of things that someone vetted and made work.

If the interactive diagram or UI you click on now owns you, it doesn't matter if it was inside the chat window or outside the chat window.

Now, in this case, it's not arbitrary UI, but if you believe that the parsing/validation/rendering/two way data binding/incremental composition (the spec requires that you be able to build up UI incrementally) of these components: https://a2ui.org/specification/v0.9-a2ui/#standard-component...

as transported/renderered/etc by NxM combinations of implementations (there are 4 renderers and a bunch of transports right now), is not going to have security issues, i've got a bridge to sell you.

Here, i'll sell it to you in gemini, just click a few times on the "totally safe text box" for me before you sign your name.

My friend once called something a babydoggle - something you know will be a boondoggle, but is still in its small formative stages.

This feels like a babydoggle to me.

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#26
post #5

So there's MCP-UI, OpenAI's ChatKit widgets and now Google's A2UI, that I know of. And probably some more... How many more variants are we introducing to solve the same problem. Sounds like a lot of wasted manhours to me.

MCP-UI and OpenAI Apps are converging into the MCP Apps extension specification: https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2025-11-21-mcp-ap...

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#27
A few days ago I was predicting to some colleagues a revival of ideas around "server-driven UI" (which never really seemed to catch on) in order to facilitate agentic UIs.

Feels good to have been on the money, but I'm also glad I didn't start a project only to be harpooned by Google straight away

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#28
post #5

So there's MCP-UI, OpenAI's ChatKit widgets and now Google's A2UI, that I know of. And probably some more... How many more variants are we introducing to solve the same problem. Sounds like a lot of wasted manhours to me.

We should make one new standard for everyone to use ...

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#30
I couldn't get this to work with the default model because it's overloaded, but I tried flash-lite, which at least gave me a response, but it only presents an actual UI 1/3rd of the time that I tried the suggested questions in the demo, and otherwise it attempts to ask me a question which doesn't present a ui at all or even do anything in the app -- i had to look at the logs to see what it was trying to do.
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