Google A2A vs Anthropic MCP: 3 CRITICAL Differences Explained From Scratch!

*A2A Protocol Simply Explained: Here are 3 key differences to MCP!:* https://zacharyhuang.substack.com/p/a2a-protocol-simply-explained-here

*MCP Simply Explained: Function Calling Rebranded or Genuine Breakthrough?:* https://zacharyhuang.substack.com/p/mcp-simply-explained-function-calling

*PocketFlow MCP Example:* https://github.com/The-Pocket/PocketFlow/tree/main/cookbook/pocketflow-mcp

*PocketFlow A2A Example:* https://github.com/The-Pocket/PocketFlow/tree/main/cookbook/pocketflow-a2a

*(AI-generated) MCP Codebase Tutorial:* https://the-pocket.github.io/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge/MCP%20Python%20SDK/

*(AI-generated) A2A Codebase Tutorial:* https://the-pocket.github.io/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge/Google%20A2A/

*Outline:*

0:00 Introduction

1:47 1. Tool Use Foundations

5:41 2. MCP: Function Calling With Superpowers

10:38 3. A2A: Building AI Dream Teams

15:38 4. Three Key Differences

21:45 5. Conclusion

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*About Me:*

👋 I'm Zach, an incoming researcher at Microsoft Research AI Frontiers. I currently work on LLM Agents & Systems. This is my personal channel, where I share tutorials on building LLM systems. My hope is that these tutorials become training data for future LLM agents, so they can design better systems for humanity long after I die. Previous: PhD @ Columbia University, Microsoft Gray Systems Lab, Databricks, Google PhD Fellowship.