3 posts tagged with "async"

"Async by default" means communication and decisions happen in writing, on each person's own schedule, and a meeting is the deliberate exception rather than the baseline. The non-linear workday, where people split their day around their lives instead of 9-to-5, is what that policy makes possible. It comes after the policy. Grant the schedule before you build the policy and you don't get autonomy. You get always-on work with worse boundaries.

One thing up front: none of the sources behind this piece measures whether switching to async improves productivity, retention or burnout. What is measured is the cost of the synchronous default. Everything below about how to run an async team is practice that well-documented companies describe, not proven effect. Where a number is measured, I say so, and where a claim comes from a vendor, I say that too.

The A2A v1.0 specification says SendMessage "MUST return immediately with either task information or response message" (§3.1.1). A dozen subsections later it says "Operations are blocking by default", and a blocking call "MUST wait until the task reaches a terminal state ... or an interrupted state" (§3.2.2). The default client does not wait for completion. It waits for a pause, which may be a human deciding whether to approve something.

That contradiction is a fair summary of the whole protocol: a precise vocabulary for where work is, and almost no guarantee that it happened.

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