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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

#51

Post by mannanj »

I want instead of being told “here’s what I think you want to see, now look at it”, “what do you want to see?” And be shown that.

Yes yes we claim the user doesn’t know what they want. I think that’s largely used as an excuse to avoid rethinking how things should meet the users needs and keep status quo where people are made to rely on systems and walled gardens. The goal of this article is UIs should work better for the user. What better way then to let them imagine (or even nudge them with example actions, buttons, text to click to render specific views) in the UI! I’ve been wanting to build something where I just ask in English from options I know I have or otherwise play and hit edges to discover what’s possible and not.

Anyone else thinking along this direction or think I’m missing something obvious here?

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#52

Post by alexgotoi »

So we're reinventing SOAP but for AI agents. Not saying that's bad - sometimes you need to remake old mistakes before you figure out what actually works.

The real question: do UIs even make sense for agents? Like the whole point of a UI is to expose functionality to humans with constraints (screens, mice, attention). Agents don't have those constraints. They can read JSON, call APIs directly, parse docs. Why are we building them middleware to click buttons?

I think this makes sense as a transition layer while we figure out what agent-native architecture looks like. But long-term it's probably training wheels.

Will include this in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#53

Post by epicurean »

epec254 wrote: post #43
awei wrote: post #41

I see how useful a universal UI language working across platforms is, but when I look at some examples from this protocol, I have the feeling it will eventually converge to what we already have, html. Instead of making all platforms support this new universal markup language, why not make them support html, which some already do, and which llms are already trained on. Some examples from the documentation: { "id": "se…

A key challenge with HTML is client side trust. How do I enable an agent platform (say Gemini, Claude, OpenAI) to render UI from an untrusted 3p agent that’s integrated with the platform? This is a common scenario in the enterprise version of these apps - eg I want to use the agent from (insert saas vendor) alongside my company’s home grown agents and data. Most HTML is actually HTML+CSS+JS - IMO, accepting this is a…

Perhaps the protocol, is then html/css/js in a strict sandbox. Component has no access to anything outside of component bounds (no network, no dom/object access, no draw access, etc).

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#55

Post by kridsdale3 »

hurturue wrote: post #42
codethief wrote: post #9

> 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.

platform independent UIs exist - HTML and Electron

Sure. HTML is a Markup-Language (it's in the acronym). Markdown is also a Markup Language. LLMs are super good at Markdown and just about every chatbot frontend now has a renderer built in.

A2UI is a superset, expanding in to more element types. If we're going to have the origin of all our data streams be string-output-generators, this seems like an ok way to go.

I've joined an effort inside Google to work in this exact space, though what we're doing has no plan to become open source, other groups are working on stuff like A2UI and we collaborate with them.

My career previous to this was nearly 20 years of native platform UI programming and things like Flutter, React Native, etc have always really annoyed me. But I've come around this year to accept that as long as LLMs on servers are going to be where the applications of the future live, we need a client-OS agnostic framework like this.

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#56

Post by kridsdale3 »

alexgotoi wrote: post #52

So we're reinventing SOAP but for AI agents. Not saying that's bad - sometimes you need to remake old mistakes before you figure out what actually works. The real question: do UIs even make sense for agents? Like the whole point of a UI is to expose functionality to humans with constraints (screens, mice, attention). Agents don't have those constraints. They can read JSON, call APIs directly, parse docs. Why are we b…

The need here is at some point an agent has to produce an output that is consumed by a human with eyes. A pixel grid on a screen is far more high bandwidth to send information to a human than a linear string of text.

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#57

Post by kridsdale3 »

pscanf wrote: post #12
MrOrelliOReilly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's annoying to have competing standards, but when dealing with a lot of unknowns it's better to allow divergence and exploration. It's a worse use of time to quibble over the best way to do things when we have no meaningful data yet to justify any decision. Companies need freedom to experiment on the best approach for all these new AI use cases. We'll then learn what is great/terrible in each approach.…

> when dealing with a lot of unknowns it's better to allow divergence and exploration I completely agree, though I'm personally sitting out all of these protocols/frameworks/libraries. In 6 months time half of them will have been abandoned, and the other half will have morphed into something very different and incompatible. For the time being, I just build things from scratch, which–as others have noted¹–is actually…

I recently heard that when automobiles were new the USA quickly ended up in a state with 80 competing manufacturing brands. In a couple decades, the market figured out what customers actually want and what styles and features mattered, and the competition ecosystem consolidated to 5 brands.

The same happened with GPUs in the 90s. When Jensen formed Nvidia there were 70 other companies selling Graphics Cards that you could put in a PCI slot. Now there are 2.

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#58

Post by kridsdale3 »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #23
mbossie wrote: 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.

I'm one of these people. We have to start working on the problem many months before the competition announces that they exist. So we are all just doing parallel evolution here. Everyone agrees that to sit and wait for a standard means you wouldn't waste energy, but you'd also have no influence.

Like you mentioned, its a good time to be employed.

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#59

Post by kridsdale3 »

ceuk wrote: post #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

Server Driven UI has absolutely caught on. Not including all the Electron apps out there, things like Instagram's native mobile apps have about half of their screens being SDUI at this point because Meta needs to be able to change them instantly, not with a 3 week release cycle.

Re: A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces

#60

Post by kridsdale3 »

epec254 wrote: post #36
barbazoo wrote: post #34

This sounds like a way to have the LLM client render dynamic UI. Is this for use during the chat session or yet another way to build actual applications?

Google PM here. Right now, it’s designed for rendering UI widgets inline with a chat conversation - it’s an extension to a2a that lets you stream JSON defining UI components in addition to chat messages.

Google SWE working in this space here. Look up my username (minus the digit) on Moma, let's talk. I can't ID you from your HN handle.
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