No universal protocol for agent-to-agent task delegation

AI agents from different vendors (coding agents, browser agents, data agents, email agents) cannot delegate subtasks to each other. If a coding agent needs to look something up in a browser, or a research agent needs to write code to verify a finding, they cannot hand off work — each agent is an island. So what? This forces every agent to be a monolith that tries to do everything itself, poorly. A coding agent bolts on a bad browser. A research agent bolts on bad code execution. Instead of an ecosystem of best-in-class specialized agents composing like Unix pipes, we get bloated generalists that are mediocre at everything. Why does this matter in the first place? The entire history of software shows that composable specialized tools beat monoliths (Unix philosophy, microservices, npm packages). Agents are repeating the mainframe mistake — bundling everything into one giant system — because there is no pipe between them. The structural reason this persists: every framework (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, Claude Agent SDK) invented its own message format, state representation, and tool schema before anyone thought about interop. Now we have N incompatible ecosystems and no incentive for any single vendor to adopt a competitor's protocol.