A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "934 Conformant A2A Agent Cards, And Who Is Publishing Them," Kin Lane, November 10, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/10/934-conformant-a2a-agent-cards-and-who-is-publishing-them/
Marguerite ran platform engineering at a mid-sized company that sold scheduling software, and she read the post on a Tuesday, between a failed deploy and a meeting she was dreading.
She opened it because of the number. The post said 1,279 providers were now serving an agent card, 934 of them conformant, advertising 7,243 skills. Two weeks earlier the count had been 594. She had been telling her director that agent discovery was a someday problem, and a doubling in two weeks made that harder to say with a straight face.
Then she read the part she had been avoiding. The post said that "Having a card and having an A2A card are not the same thing." It split the conformant ones into two halves, and the first half was documentation platforms, where most cards "got a valid card because their docs platform turned one on." Marguerite felt a small, unwelcome jolt. Her company used one of those platforms. She had no idea whether it had published anything on their behalf.
Her first reaction was irritation, and she was honest with herself about why. The post seemed to be calling a card like that a lesser thing. It said the card helps an agent find the documentation but "doesn't tell an agent anything their API can do." That felt a little unfair to her. A docs card was free, it was correct, and nobody on her team had to maintain it. She typed a note to herself arguing that discovery of documentation was still discovery.
But the note didn't hold up well when she reread it. The post never said the docs cards were wrong. It called them a fine start. What it said was missing was the middle, established API providers exposing the jobs their APIs actually do as skills, at their own endpoint. Her company was exactly that kind of provider. Booking a slot, moving an appointment and cancelling with a refund were the jobs, and an agent reading a card that said only to use it when building integrations would learn none of them.
She also felt some discomfort about the list of agent-native companies, with their pay-per-call services and trust registries. Much of it was outside anything she understood or wanted to chase. She decided that was allowed. She did not need to become one of them to fix her own gap.
What she did was small. She did not open a project or schedule a workshop. She went to the company's docs domain and requested the path the post named, /.well-known/agent-card.json, to see whether a card already existed there. One did. It had one skill, and it declared protocol version 0.3.
She copied the JSON into a ticket for her team without comment, and added a single line asking who would own it.