HTTP was never an extraordinarily different protocol, there was really nothing to it from a technical perspective. What was important was it wrapped up a lot of the concepts from the various hypertext and linking protocols that existed into a standard that was widely supported. The standard and the compatibility across servers and clients made it important. This is generally true for protocols across the board. In fact very few standards protocols are particularly revolutionary from a technical perspective. That’s in many ways very much not the point.

Is it something like this:

Ages and ages ago I was an EE turned programmer and everyone was hyping JUnit at the time. I had a customer ask for it on a project so fine I'll learn it. I kept thinking it was stupid because in my mind it barely did anything. But then I got it: it did barely do anything, but it did things you'd commonly need to do for testing and it did them in a somewhat standardized way that kept you from having to roll your own every time. Suddenly it didn't feel so stupid.

It's just something that needs to be done if you want LLMs to be useful. Everything does not have to be a technological marvel.

I wonder if it's just our egos talking, telling us that for something to have value within this technical sphere it has to be complex and 'hard won'?

I see this agent stuff as a pretty basic agreement wrapped up in the vernacular of a protocol, i.e. "we'll put this stuff in the 'role' prop on our JSON", and then everyone else knows where to look for it. It's not especially important what we decide, as long as we create shared expectations.

I used to think protocols and RFCs and other products of standards bodies were the juicy 'big boy table' of tech, but then I realised: ok, it's not so complex–and perhaps doesn't itch my engineering itch–, but SOMEONE needs to take responsibility for deciding the protocol, otherwise it's just a bunch of randoms making up interfaces 1:1 with other parties and no useful tooling emerging for a long time. Best to beat it to the punch and just figure out a 'good enough' approach so we can all get on and make cool stuff.

Addendum: I will say, however, that the AI space has a particularly unhealthy attraction to naming, coining, forming myriad acronyms and otherwise confusing what should be a very simple thing by wrapping it up in a whitepaper and saying LOOK MA LOOK!

Well.. autodiff isn't particularly technically sophisticated. But I doubt that when it was first invented in the 1950s, people could have foreseen that a lot of autodiff put together can write an implementation of autodiff.

If you're interested in more technical approaches, I think they're starting to come together, slowly. I've seen several research directions (operads / cellular sheaves for a theory of multiagent collaboration, the theory of open games for compositional forwards/backwards strategy/planning in open environments) that would fit in quite nicely. And to some extent, the earliest frameworks are going to be naive implementations of these directions.

Even worse is that virtually no one in this space even recognizes the fairly rich research into “agents” throughout the history of computer science.

Mention John Holland’s work in adaptive systems, Hewitt’s actor model or even Minsky’s “Society of the Mind” and you’ll be met with blank stares.

I do believe LLMs have the potential to make these older ideas relevant again and potentially create something amazing, but sadly the ignorant hype makes it virtually impossible to have intelligent conversations about these possibilities.

Too young, too naive.I think you just need to study the history of previous generation of protocols and standards to appreciate its importance.

HTML was XML for the web. Nothing to it from a technical perspective.