Agent Protocol Fragmentation: Designing for A2A, MCP, and What Comes Next
Most teams picking an agent protocol are actually making three separate decisions at once — and treating them as one is why so many integrations break the moment a second framework enters the picture.
The three decisions are: how your agent talks to tools and data (vertical integration), how your agent collaborates with other agents (horizontal coordination), and how your agent surfaces state to a human interface (interaction layer). Google's A2A, Anthropic's MCP, and OpenAPI-based REST solve for different layers of this stack. When engineers conflate them, they either over-engineer a single-agent setup with multi-agent machinery, or under-engineer a multi-agent workflow with single-agent tooling. Both failures are expensive to refactor once in production.
