Starting with model access and adding the rest later is good advice. My worry is that a small team picks MCP for tools and then finds its vendor built something of its own instead. How often does that happen now?
Excellent map — the seven-boundaries framing finally makes the protocol soup legible. One gap I'd flag for the next edition: the protocols tell an agent what it can touch (MCP for tools, A2A for agent-to-agent), but almost nobody is standardizing what an agent must *record*. Permissions are being spec'd; audit trails aren't. An agent ecosystem with standardized access and no standardized accountability is a breach with good plumbing. Would love to see the provenance/auditability boundary get its own protocol.
The boundary-contract framing is more actionable than treating interoperability as a single universal agent standard. I’d add that trace context and authorization should travel across those boundaries together; otherwise A2A/MCP composition can preserve the tool call while losing the policy and provenance needed to audit a consequential action.
The boundary-by-boundary framing is the honest bit. Every other standards piece turns into a horse race for the one protocol to rule them all, and this one admits you can take MCP without A2A and nobody dies. Four communication protocols plus a file format for instructions isn't convergence, it's a neighbourhood — which is fine, portability at each edge beats pretending there's one bus. And "still emerging" about Open Responses is doing real work there; that's code for nobody's bet the house on it yet.
Starting with model access and adding the rest later is good advice. My worry is that a small team picks MCP for tools and then finds its vendor built something of its own instead. How often does that happen now?
Excellent map — the seven-boundaries framing finally makes the protocol soup legible. One gap I'd flag for the next edition: the protocols tell an agent what it can touch (MCP for tools, A2A for agent-to-agent), but almost nobody is standardizing what an agent must *record*. Permissions are being spec'd; audit trails aren't. An agent ecosystem with standardized access and no standardized accountability is a breach with good plumbing. Would love to see the provenance/auditability boundary get its own protocol.
The boundary-contract framing is more actionable than treating interoperability as a single universal agent standard. I’d add that trace context and authorization should travel across those boundaries together; otherwise A2A/MCP composition can preserve the tool call while losing the policy and provenance needed to audit a consequential action.
The boundary-by-boundary framing is the honest bit. Every other standards piece turns into a horse race for the one protocol to rule them all, and this one admits you can take MCP without A2A and nobody dies. Four communication protocols plus a file format for instructions isn't convergence, it's a neighbourhood — which is fine, portability at each edge beats pretending there's one bus. And "still emerging" about Open Responses is doing real work there; that's code for nobody's bet the house on it yet.