Build Your First A2A Agent Pair in Python (15 Minutes, No Cloud Required)

Google's A2A protocol hit v1.0 on March 12, 2026. You've probably seen the announcement — enterprise framing, agent interoperability, Salesforce and SAP and ServiceNow on the logo slide. What you haven't seen is a tutorial that just works locally, without a Google Cloud account, without paid APIs, without enterprise infrastructure. The official demos are GCP demos. They teach the platform, not the protocol. This is the other tutorial. You'll build two Python agents that communicate over A2A, run them in two terminal windows, and watch a task travel from dispatcher to executor and back — in under 15 minutes, on localhost. What A2A Is (30 Seconds) A2A is a protocol for agent-to-agent task delegation. When your orchestrator agent needs to hand off work to a specialist agent, A2A is how they talk. The mental model that clicked for me is the HTTP analogy. HTTP didn't create the web — it gave every computer a shared language. A2A does the same thing for agents: any A2A-compliant agent can ca