UAP — Universal Agent Protocol

Two agents need to talk to each other. One lives in your backend, one runs as a subprocess, maybe a third lives on a partner's server. They all speak JSON, but they don't speak the same JSON — their messages are shaped differently, their tool-call conventions don't line up, and gluing them together is a pile of adapter code that nobody wants to maintain.

@miller-tech/uap — UAP, a Universal Agent Protocol — is a published npm package that takes a swing at that problem. It defines a protocol layer for agents to communicate with each other, and ships an implementation so you don't have to hand-roll the wire format. Think of it as the agent-to-agent equivalent of what HTTP is for browsers: a shared contract that lets things built independently still talk.

This is for developers who are already past the single-agent stage. If you're building one agent in one process, you don't need a protocol — you need a function call. But once you've got two or three agents, possibly in different languages or services, and you want them to hand work back and forth without inventing a new message format for each pair, a protocol like UAP starts earning its keep.

The honest caveat: every "universal" protocol is universal until the next one shows up. Standards at this layer are still shaking out. Treat UAP as one opinionated shape among several, read its spec before committing, and pick it because it fits your mental model — not because the name promises the world.

Pair it with a shared-type layer like AI Agent Types for the TypeScript story, or with a multi-agent framework like Squad Station 2 when you want both orchestration and protocol in one stack.

Read the spec, wire up two agents with it, and see if the glue code shrinks.