*Translated and edited from a Chinese forum post on zhichai.net. The original uses a George Gamow-style 'Mr. Tompkins' allegory to explain AI agent interoperability protocols.*
Mr. Tompkins dreams he has wandered into a bustling grand cosmic bazaar. The stalls are not run by vegetable vendors but by AI agents of all shapes and sizes, their indicator lights blinking.
"Hey, Google Translator over there!" shouts an OpenAI secretary shaped like a blue box. "I've got a localization task on 'galactic cold jokes.' How many tokens of 'handling fee' will it take?"
"Depends on the language," the blue box replies. "If it's 'ancient Martian,' I'll have to consult that DeepL expert over there—we'll need to sign an interoperability contract."
Mr. Tompkins stares. "Professor, what are they doing?"
"This is the Agent Economy of 2026," says the Professor, dressed in a crisp tax-officer uniform. "In short: they've learned to delegate work to each other using a common protocol."
1. The status quo: digital islands sealed behind ecosystem walls
The Professor gestures at run-down factories ringed by high walls outside the bazaar—the big-vendor models of 2025.
"AI used to be like lions in a zoo. OpenAI's lion didn't know Google's giraffe. To make them collaborate on a complex project, you had to write endless tedious API glue code yourself—and any update on one side wiped out your work. This physical blockage of cognition severely limited the explosion of social productivity. It's called 'collaborative entropy growth caused by proprietary protocols.'"
2. Interoperability protocols: the Babel tower that lets the lion and the giraffe shake hands
"But today's protocols teach these lions and giraffes the cyber handshake," says the Professor, pointing at golden characters flowing between stalls.
Through a three-layer logical contract, it equalizes digital power:
- Physical picture (standardized translation of intent): any AI entering the bazaar must convert its capabilities, costs, and response speed into a standardized business card called an "Agent-Schema."
- Automatic discovery and negotiation: the most magical part. When you, a human, want to buy "a ticket to Pluto tomorrow," your personal agent spontaneously enters the bazaar and negotiates, compares prices, and even runs multi-round logical collisions with dozens of airline agents in seconds, until it returns the optimal solution.
- Cross-platform causal closed loops: an agent based on Claude can subcontract a "drawing task" to a Midjourney-based agent; once the image comes back, both parties enter the same logical sandbox and cross-review quality against the original task requirements.
3. A Gamow-esque reverie: prosperity is the "unification of logical interfaces"
The so-called "agent era" is not about AI becoming smarter.
It is about the entire digital world finally settling on a set of "collaboration primitives" as stable as physical constants and as universal as electrical outlets.
Interoperability research tells us: the endgame of AI is a cross-platform collective dance.
As Mr. Tompkins watches the once-chaotic bazaar become orderly under the protocol's baton—every task flowing as smoothly as electrons in a superconductor—he realizes: the progress of civilization often begins the moment arrogant souls that once repelled each other finally decide to speak the same language.
The takeaway
When designing your enterprise AI system, stop dreaming of building a closed-loop empire.
Go plug in your "interoperability plugin."
If your system cannot subcontract logic to global competitors without human intervention, then the moat you painstakingly built will end up as a cold, silent tomb for all your compute.
*Original post tagged: #AgentEconomy #Interoperability #AIInfrastructure #MultiAgentSystems #BusinessAutomation #FeynmanLearning*