Agent Action Protocol (AAP)
MCP got us started, but is insufficient
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Background: I've been working on agentic guardrails because agents act in expensive/terrible ways and something needs to be able to say "Maybe don't do that" to the agents, but guardrails are almost impossible to enforce with the current way things are built.Context: We keep running into so many problems/limitations today with MCP. It was created so that agents have context on how to act in the world, it wasn't designed to become THE standard rails for agentic behavior. We keep tacking things on to it trying to improve it, but it needs to die a SOAP death so REST can rise in it's place. We need a standard protocol for whenever an agent is taking action. Anywhere.I'm almost certainly the wrong person to design this, but I'm seeing more and more people tack things on to MCP rather than fix the underlying issues. The fastest way to get a good answer is to submit a bad one on the internet. So here I am. I think we need a new protocol. Whether it's AAP or something else, I submit my best effort.Please rip it apart, lets make something better.
HN · launched Mar 3, 2026 · 13 upvotes (top 33%) · 1 view
Niche: multi-agent frameworks and protocols · 298 launches, 11 in the last 7 days ▼ -31% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 298 launches in multi-agent frameworks and protocols →
Could you build this?
Yes Creating a protocol specification and reference middleware for validating and gatekeeping AI tool actions can be rapidly built using standard schemas and proxy code.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Skills, MCP (Model Context Protocol), Function calling, REST APIs, CLI
Concerns raised: Over-specced and over-constrained design, Unclear positioning relative to MCP, Complexity compared to existing solutions
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 270 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #100 of 271 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 111 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Durable Actor Session Protocol · hn · 2026-09-28 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Open-source browser for AI agents · hn · 2026-03-11 · 155 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Risk Analysis Database of Every MCP Server · hn · 2026-02-05 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- SentinelAgent Guard · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Abject: the first self-aware object runtime · hn · 2026-04-02 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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