A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "What 467 Conformant A2A Agent Cards Are Actually Offering," Kin Lane, October 26, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/26/what-466-conformant-a2a-agent-cards-are-actually-offering/
Priya works as a platform engineer at a company that makes invoicing software. She read the post on a Monday between two meetings, expecting a count. She got one: 594 providers serving an agent card, 467 of them conformant. Her first reaction was mild pride, because she assumed her company was somewhere in that 467.
Then she kept reading. Of the conformant cards, 221 are served from a documentation site, and 194 of those have exactly one skill. The description begins with “Use when building integrations with…” and she felt her stomach drop a little. She didn't know whether her company's card said that. She hadn't made one. As far as she could remember, nobody on her team had made one.
She opened a terminal and requested the well-known path on her company's docs domain. A card came back. It was valid, it carried the company name, and it had one skill. The post's phrase for what that skill amounts to was “read our docs.” It felt unkind, and she got a little defensive. Her docs were good. She had fought for the budget for them. An agent that lands there could do worse.
The post said as much, and she noticed that. The author called it a real step up from nothing and said he didn't think it was a bad thing. Still, she disliked the line about the agent having to figure out the API, the auth and the onboarding on its own. Her API had a sandbox, a token flow with three scopes, and a webhook model that took new hires a week to understand. A card that waved at the docs left every bit of that for a stranger's software to discover by trial and error.
She also checked the protocol version, and it said 0.3. The post reported that 370 of the 467 conformant cards declare 0.3 and only 71 declare 1.0. So her company was in the majority, which was not the comfort she wanted.
She pushed back, at least in her head. The second half of the post praised small companies selling data by the call, and she doubted her customers wanted their invoicing agent haggling over per-call pricing. Established businesses might reasonably move slower, and a single docs pointer might be the right amount of exposure for now. She wasn't convinced the gap the author called an opportunity was one her company needed to close this quarter.
But the last paragraph stuck with her. A card that says here is our documentation helps an agent find you, and a card that names the jobs lets an agent work with you. She couldn't argue with the difference.
She didn't propose a project. She opened a blank note and wrote down the jobs the API actually does, in plain verbs: create an invoice, send a reminder, reconcile a payment. She stopped at three, because that was what she could defend. Then she attached the note to a message to her docs lead asking who controls the card and whether it can be edited. She hit send before the next meeting started.