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The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#211

Post by stavros »

Maxious wrote: post #176
kristopolous wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had never heard of charles ... ( https://www.charlesproxy.com/ ) I basically wrote a simple version of it 20 years ago ( https://github.com/kristopolous/proxy ) that I use because back then, this didn't exist ... I need to remember to toss my old tools aside

even the approach that charles takes for intercepting TLS traffic is a bit old school (proxies, fake root certs etc.) - cool kids use eBPF https://mitmproxy.org/posts/local-capture/linux/

I can see how you don't need a proxy any more, but I don't see how you can bypass TLS without fake root certs, even with eBPF.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#212

Post by NickNaraghi »

LeonidBugaev wrote: post #51

To put it simple: A2A is for communication between the agents. MCP is how agent communicate with its tools. Important aspect of A2A, is that it has a notion of tasks, task rediness, and etc. E.g. you can give it a task and expect completely in few days, and get notified via webhook or polling it. For the end users for sure A2A will cause a big confusing, and can replace a lot of current MCP usage.

If an agent could wrap itself in an MCP server, would that make A2A redundant?

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#213

Post by partdavid »

hliyan wrote: post #63

Are we rediscovering SOA and WSDL, but this time for LLM interop instead of web services? I may be wrong, but I'm starting to wonder whether software engineering degrees should include a history subject about the rise and fall of various architectures, methodologies and patterns.

We have already been through some generations of this rediscovery an I've worked at places where graphql type importing, protobuf stub generation etc. all worked in just the same way. There's a post elsewhere on HN today about how awesome it is to put your logic _in the database_ which I remember at least two generations of, in the document DB era as well as the relational era.

If there's one thing I've observed about developers in general, it's that they'd rather build than learn.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#214

Post by fsndz »

ramesh31 wrote: post #202
fsndz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you are telling me that hallucinations (that by definition happen at the model layer) are an engineering problem ? so if we just spin up the right architecture, hallucinations won't be a problem anymore ? I have doubts

>so you are telling me that hallucinations (that by definition happen at the model layer) are an engineering problem ? Yes. Hallucinations were a big problem with single shot prompting. No one is seriously doing that anymore. You have an agentic refinement process with an evaluator in the loop that takes in the initial output, quality checks it, and returns a pass/fail to close the loop or try again, using tool calls…

okay give me the link to a LLM-based system that does not hallucinate then

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#215

Post by sunpazed »

zellyn wrote: post #3

It’s frustratingly difficult to see what these (A2A and MCP) protocols actually look like. All I want is a simple example conversation that includes the actual LLM outputs used to trigger a call and the JSON that goes over the wire… maybe I’ll take some time and make a cheat-sheet. I have to say, the endorsements at the end somehow made this seem worse…

I had the same frustration and wanted to see "under the hood", so I coded up this little agent tool to play with MCP (sse and stdio), https://github.com/sunpazed/agent-mcp

I really is just json-rpc 2.0 under the hood, either piped to stdio or POSTed over http.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#216

Post by bryan_w »

chipgap98 wrote: post #122

They are pitching this as complementary to the MCP [0], but I don't see it. What is the value in agents communicating in agents as opposed to just treating other agents as tools? [0]: https://google.github.io/A2A/#/topics/a2a_and_mcp

They are thinking about Enterprises. Shirley from accounting isn't going to install an mcp service to pull the receipt photos from Dropbox and upload them to SAP/Concur (expense reimbursement)

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#217

Post by bryan_w »

smusamashah wrote: post #95

In the video example, I am kind of baffled that LLM is being trusted to pick candidates for the role. How much guarantee does Google's LLM/agent provide that it didn't hallucinate (read wrong info) in any of the steps including parsing job description and than matching that with profile of candidates? I don't understand when these LLMs are presented to solve real life problems as if an LLM is like a sane person doing…

I'm glad someone else saw this. This is one of the few areas you wouldn't want to show off what you're doing with AI.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#218

Post by wongarsu »

zellyn wrote: post #3

It’s frustratingly difficult to see what these (A2A and MCP) protocols actually look like. All I want is a simple example conversation that includes the actual LLM outputs used to trigger a call and the JSON that goes over the wire… maybe I’ll take some time and make a cheat-sheet. I have to say, the endorsements at the end somehow made this seem worse…

You weren't kidding with the endorsements. It's endorsed by KPMG, Accenture and BCG. McKinsey and PwC are not in the partner list but are mentioned as contributors. Honorable mention to SAP as another company whose endorsements are a warning sign

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#219

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

stavros wrote: post #211
Maxious wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even the approach that charles takes for intercepting TLS traffic is a bit old school (proxies, fake root certs etc.) - cool kids use eBPF https://mitmproxy.org/posts/local-capture/linux/

I can see how you don't need a proxy any more, but I don't see how you can bypass TLS without fake root certs, even with eBPF.

new to this program as well but looks really nice.

i think it is still a proxy though unless I’m missing something (beyond the name lol).

[here's a section on macos dealing with certs](https://mitmproxy.org/posts/local-capture/macos/)

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#220

Post by lherron »

whalesalad wrote: post #143
config_yml wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way about OpenAI‘s new responses API. Under the cover of DX they‘re marketing a new default, which is we hold your state and sell it back to you.

OpenAI is tedious to work with. Took me a solid day of fooling around with it before I realized the chat api and the chat completions api are two entirely different apis. Then you have the responses api which is a third thing. The irony is that gpt4 has no clue which approach is correct. Give it the same prompt three times and you’ll get a solution that uses each of these that has a wildly different footprint, be it…

Wait till you deal with google genai lib vs google generativeai lib
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