A2A Protocol

Overview

The A2A Protocol skill brings Google’s Agent-to-Agent communication standard into your AI agent’s toolkit. Unlike MCP (which connects models to tools and data), A2A handles something different — agent-to-agent collaboration. Your Claude Code or Cursor agent can discover other agents, exchange messages, and coordinate on long-running tasks without sharing their internal stack.

What It Does

Got multiple agents working on the same project? A2A lets them talk to each other. Each agent publishes an “agent card” — a lightweight JSON document describing its capabilities, endpoints, and auth requirements. Other agents discover these cards and start sending requests via JSON-RPC, gRPC, or plain HTTP.

The protocol supports:

• Agent discovery — agents find each other via publicly hosted agent cards
• Task management — send a task, get streaming updates, or receive push notifications when it’s done
• Cross-vendor — works between agents built on different frameworks (Claude Code agents talking to Gemini agents, for example)
• Complementary to MCP — A2A doesn’t replace MCP; it sits on top of it. MCP handles tool access, A2A handles inter-agent coordination

How to Use It

npx skills add https://github.com/absolutelyskilled/absolutelyskilled --skill a2a-protocol

Once installed, your agent knows the A2A protocol spec and can participate in multi-agent workflows. The skill includes the full A2A specification, agent card templates, and message formats for task subscription and cancellation.

Who Needs This

Anyone running multi-agent systems. If you’ve got one agent writing code and another reviewing it, A2A lets them coordinate naturally. The protocol is especially useful for agent teams where each member has a specialized role — research, coding, testing, deployment.

Bottom Line

A2A is still young (first seen on skills.sh in March 2026), but it solves a real problem. As multi-agent setups become the norm, knowing A2A gives your agent a solid foundation for cross-platform collaboration. Pair it with MCP for a complete agent communication stack.

Check the skills.sh page for the latest install stats and security audit results.