Stacks and Flows

Protocol Boundary Guide · Source-verified

Agent Finder and ARD: discovery is not execution

Agent Finder and Agentic Resource Discovery make agents easier to describe and discover. That is a useful distribution boundary, not a common runtime, security model, or quality guarantee.

What the sources establish

  • GitHub announced Agent Finder and Agentic Resource Discovery in June 2026.
  • The ARD specification is maintained in a public repository and marked draft.
  • A discoverable declaration does not establish runtime compatibility or safe tool permissions.

The boundary it standardizes

ARD can describe an agent and help a compatible surface find it. Execution remains the responsibility of the host, provider, and application.

The boundary it leaves open

Identity, tool authorization, billing, persistence, evaluation, and incident response remain implementation decisions.

Adoption test

Require a named host, a versioned declaration, and a permission review before calling an agent portable.

Decision detail

  1. Use ARD when portable discovery metadata reduces bespoke catalog work.
  2. Validate each declared capability against the actual host and authorization model.
  3. Do not treat listing presence as evidence of output quality or operational readiness.

Evidence

These claims are source-verified. We do not label this page hands-on or benchmarked because no reproducible test artifact is attached.

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