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The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#3

Post by zellyn »

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…

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#4

Post by trash_cat »

This is very interesting. I feel like we are going towards a future where you will have personal agents that know a lot about us and will interact with other corporate and government agents to complete beurocratic and non beurocratic tasks. Those with more capable agents will have to pay a premium.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#7

Post by _pdp_ »

Link to repo: https://github.com/google/A2A Docs: https://google.github.io/A2A/#/documentation

I think they are trying to ride the MCP hype as well with their own implementation that is also meh. MCP itself is also an over-engineered implementation of AI plugins by OpenAI. Obviously the end game is control over a standard which can act as a strategic tool for boosting valuations or even better product positioning.

The better approach is to simply use open standards that already exists but I guess this is just not sexy.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#8

Post by skeeter2020 »

sharemywin wrote: post #5

on it's face this kind of seems dumb. aren't agents supposed to be adaptable enough to handle any protocol?

yeah - I don't get it. I'm all for abstraction but the entire point of using agents at the UX-level is you didn't need a single agreed-upon protocol to make it work. Feels like they're using the old Microsoft fire and motion strategy to keep people busy on their tech, or artificially introduce structure & coupling that - suprise - benefits the maker of shovels, not the diggers.

Re: The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

#9

Post by flakiness »

> A2A is an open protocol that complements Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which provides helpful tools and context to agents.

A "server" sample: https://github.com/google/A2A/tree/main/samples/js/src/serve...

So it looks like the point is that it keeps the connection/context open for multiple interactions vs. MCP, which is more like pure request-response?

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