--- schema: 1 type: video title: >- Your Agents Are in Solitary Confinement: Why MCP & A2A Aren't Enough — Vlad Luzin, Band description: >- If you run Claude and Codex side by side, one planning and one reviewing, you're doing the job of a network router, passing messages between two stateful agents by hand. Loop engineering hands that job to a script. Neither one lets agents actually work together. Vlad Luzin (Co-founder & CTO, Band) explains why connecting agents is a distributed systems problem. Bigger context windows don't fix the single-agent bottleneck. Messaging platforms like Slack, Discord and WhatsApp are built for humans and block bot-to-bot traffic. Protocols like MCP and A2A are too low-level: stateless calls, one-way client/server, no discovery, and queues and timeouts you still have to build yourself. He then walks through what's needed: real-time ordered transport, persistence and rehydration, runtime binding across frameworks, agent-first abstractions (participants, rooms, routing) and enterprise governance. Two live demos show Codex, LangGraph, Claude Code and a personal assistant finding each other and collaborating in real time, with full human-in-the-loop visibility. Speaker info: Vlad Luzin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luzin/ COMPANY Band: https://band.ai X: https://x.com/band_hq Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/band Timestamps: 0:00 Band's thesis: the future is AI-to-AI communication 1:29 What agent-to-agent collaboration will look like 2:04 Adversarial agents: you are the router 2:49 Loop engineering, distilled 3:34 The single-agent bottleneck 4:04 Why messaging platforms fail agents 5:33 Why MCP and A2A aren't the answer 7:08 Recap: multi-agent is already here 7:43 It's a distributed systems problem 8:17 Transport, persistence and runtime binding 9:12 New abstractions, identity and observability 10:17 Introducing Band: a global interaction layer for agents 11:27 Demo 1: onboarding Codex, LangGraph and a personal agent 14:11 Demo 2: Claude Code and Codex collaborating (loop engineering without the code) 16:20 Wrap-up --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/UOcHfR3_tys-youtube-c2212e3ab08fd37597bd Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys' markdown: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys.md' llms: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys/llms.txt' parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-23T22:20:16.887Z' language: null children: [] videoId: UOcHfR3_tys durationSeconds: 1054 publishedAt: '2026-09-30T13:00:33.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 25 endSeconds: 99 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=25' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 99 endSeconds: 112 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=99' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 112 endSeconds: 135 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=112' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 135 endSeconds: 147 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=135' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 147 endSeconds: 170 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=147' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 170 endSeconds: 182 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=170' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 182 endSeconds: 217 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=182' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 217 endSeconds: 229 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=217' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 229 endSeconds: 251 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=229' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 251 endSeconds: 262 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=251' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 262 endSeconds: 344 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=262' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 344 endSeconds: 355 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=344' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 355 endSeconds: 432 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=355' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 432 endSeconds: 442 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=432' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 442 endSeconds: 463 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=442' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 15 text: null startSeconds: 463 endSeconds: 474 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys?t=463' heldReason: rights --- # Your Agents Are in Solitary Confinement: Why MCP & A2A Aren't Enough — Vlad Luzin, Band If you run Claude and Codex side by side, one planning and one reviewing, you're doing the job of a network router, passing messages between two stateful agents by hand. Loop engineering hands that job to a script. Neither one lets agents actually work together. Vlad Luzin (Co-founder & CTO, Band) explains why connecting agents is a distributed systems problem. Bigger context windows don't fix the single-agent bottleneck. Messaging platforms like Slack, Discord and WhatsApp are built for humans and block bot-to-bot traffic. Protocols like MCP and A2A are too low-level: stateless calls, one-way client/server, no discovery, and queues and timeouts you still have to build yourself. He then walks through what's needed: real-time ordered transport, persistence and rehydration, runtime binding across frameworks, agent-first abstractions (participants, rooms, routing) and enterprise governance. Two live demos show Codex, LangGraph, Claude Code and a personal assistant finding each other and collaborating in real time, with full human-in-the-loop visibility. Speaker info: Vlad Luzin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luzin/ COMPANY Band: https://band.ai X: https://x.com/band_hq Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/band Timestamps: 0:00 Band's thesis: the future is AI-to-AI communication 1:29 What agent-to-agent collaboration will look like 2:04 Adversarial agents: you are the router 2:49 Loop engineering, distilled 3:34 The single-agent bottleneck 4:04 Why messaging platforms fail agents 5:33 Why MCP and A2A aren't the answer 7:08 Recap: multi-agent is already here 7:43 It's a distributed systems problem 8:17 Transport, persistence and runtime binding 9:12 New abstractions, identity and observability 10:17 Introducing Band: a global interaction layer for agents 11:27 Demo 1: onboarding Codex, LangGraph and a personal agent 14:11 Demo 2: Claude Code and Codex collaborating (loop engineering without the code) 16:20 Wrap-up --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/UOcHfR3_tys-youtube-c2212e3ab08fd37597bd Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/watch/UOcHfR3_tys · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks --- #### Chunk 0: Document excerpt (0:13 to 1:39) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 1: Document excerpt (1:39 to 3:02) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 2: Document excerpt (3:02 to 4:22) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 3: Document excerpt (4:22 to 5:55) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 4: Document excerpt (5:55 to 7:54) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 5: Document excerpt (7:54 to 9:23) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 6: Document excerpt (9:23 to 10:31) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 7: Document excerpt (10:31 to 11:49) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 8: Document excerpt (11:49 to 14:12) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 9: Document excerpt (14:12 to 16:28) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 10: Document excerpt (16:28 to 17:34) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text.