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The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#231

Post by varelaseb »

medbrane wrote: post #194
a_wild_dandan wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose Google wants us to pretend that "agents" can't be "resources." MCP is already well established (Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, etc), so Google plastering their announcement with A2A endorsements just reeks of insecurity. I figure this A2A idea will wind up in the infamous Google graveyard within 8 months.

But MCP doesn't claim to address agent to agent communication, right?

It's not so much about what you _can do_ but about the messaging and posturing, which is what drives the adoption of standards as a social phenomenon.

My team's been working on implementing MCP-agents and agents-as-tools and we consistently saw confusion from everyone we were selling this into (who were already bought in to hosting an MCP server for their API or SDK) for their agents because "that's not what it's for".

Kinda weird, but kinda simple.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#232

Post by varelaseb »

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

It's not so much about what you _can do_ but about the messaging and posturing, which is what drives the adoption of standards as a social phenomenon.

My team's been working on implementing MCP-agents and agents-as-tools and we consistently saw confusion from everyone we were selling this into (who were already bought in to hosting an MCP server for their API or SDK) for their agents because "that's not what it's for".

Kinda weird, but kinda simple.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#233

Post by varelaseb »

humblyCrazy wrote: post #44

i dont understand how it is different from mcp. The blog just says "A2A is an open protocol that complements Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which provides helpful tools and context to agents." There is no example or anything on how does it complement it

It's not so much about what you _can do_ but about the messaging and posturing, which is what drives the adoption of standards as a social phenomenon.

My team's been working on implementing MCP-agents and agents-as-tools and we consistently saw confusion from everyone we were selling this into (who were already bought in to hosting an MCP server for their API or SDK) for their agents because "that's not what it's for".

Kinda weird, but kinda simple.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#234

Post by ycombinatrix »

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…

>the endorsements at the end somehow made this seem worse

holy cow you weren't kidding. legit the last people i would trust with software development.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#235

Post by echelon »

bob1029 wrote: post #198
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.

Some of us are still building new products with XML RPC techniques. WSDLs and XSDs done right are a godsend for transmitting your API spec to someone. I use .NET and can call xsd.exe to generate classes from the files in a few seconds. It "just works" if both sides follow all of the rules. The APIs I work with would be cartoonish if we didn't have these tools. We're talking 10 megabytes of generated sources. It is 10…

> WSDLs and XSDs done right are a godsend for transmitting your API spec to someone. I use .NET and can call xsd.exe to generate classes from the files in a few seconds.

This sounds like protobuf and gRPC. Is that a close analogy?

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#236

Post by kristopolous »

stavros wrote: post #226
kristopolous wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well hopefully my current thing, a streaming markdown renderer for the terminal ( https://github.com/kristopolous/Streamdown ) hasn't also been a waste of time

Why would anything be a waste of time?

I build things I cannot find.

Every project I do is an assertion that I don't believe the thing I make exists.

I have been unable to find a streaming forward only markdown renderer for the terminal nor have I been able to find any suitable library that I could build one with.

So I've taken on the ambitious effort of building my own parser and renderer and go through all the grueling testing that entails

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#237

Post by nsonha »

stavros wrote: post #226
kristopolous wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well hopefully my current thing, a streaming markdown renderer for the terminal ( https://github.com/kristopolous/Streamdown ) hasn't also been a waste of time

Why would anything be a waste of time?

either that or "waste of time" is a meaningless phrase

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#238

Post by nl »

swyx wrote: post #157
mlenhard wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the same boat in regards to trying to find the actual JSON that was going over the wire. I ended up using Charles to capture all the network requests. I haven't finished the post yet, but if you want to see the actual JSON I have all of the request and responses here https://www.catiemcp.com/blog/mcp-transport-layer/

itd be nice if you prettified your json in the blogpost fwiw i thought the message structure was pretty clear on the docs https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/concepts/architecture#m...

Some (many?) people learn better from concrete examples and generalize from them.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#239

Post by nsonha »

echelon wrote: post #235
bob1029 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are still building new products with XML RPC techniques. WSDLs and XSDs done right are a godsend for transmitting your API spec to someone. I use .NET and can call xsd.exe to generate classes from the files in a few seconds. It "just works" if both sides follow all of the rules. The APIs I work with would be cartoonish if we didn't have these tools. We're talking 10 megabytes of generated sources. It is 10…

> WSDLs and XSDs done right are a godsend for transmitting your API spec to someone. I use .NET and can call xsd.exe to generate classes from the files in a few seconds. This sounds like protobuf and gRPC. Is that a close analogy?

The latter would add subscription and streaming, and more efficient transports. But yeah they are basically the same idea.

I hate that for years the concept of RPC was equated to XML which in turn equated to some implementation of the (XML based) tool and then a whole lot of distracting discourse around XML vs JSON, we kinda do still have that these days with yaml vs whatever.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#240

Post by nsonha »

maxwellg wrote: post #131
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.

I wasn't around for WSDL so please correct me if I am wrong - but the main weakness of WSDL was that no applications were able to take advantage of dynamic service and method discovery? A service could broadcast a WSDL but something needed to make use of it, and if you're writing an application you might as well just write against a known API instead of an unknown one. LLMs promise to be the unstructured glue that ca…

> take advantage of dynamic service and method discovery

Is that how people build system even today? Dynamic service and method discovery sounds good on paper but I've never actually seen it in practice.

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