TL;DR. Where the rest of Landscapes line up the convergence of moving trends, this bucket holds the standalone pieces those trends stand on. A foundation does not branch every week — so it belongs as a single piece, not a category (a space where the branching fans out in every direction).
What to call this
Definition — where other categories deal with a trend branching right now, this one holds the stable foundation that branching presupposes — for topics that don't form their own category. For a topic to become a category, multiple signals have to fan out in every direction at the same moment. A foundation is the opposite — it hardens into a standard and moves less. So a single post is enough; forcing it into a category would overlap, over the same resources, with slots like research/prompt-injection (injection).
What it currently holds
- MCP — the communication standard between agents and external tools/data. agent-skill and the other layers above it all sit on this protocol. The standard solved connectability, and the operations, security, and skills on top of it branched off into their own categories.
- A2A — the standard for communication between agents. Where MCP connects an agent to tools, A2A connects it to other agents — the counterpart on the same Linux Foundation track. The discovery and trust operations on top of it are a separate axis outside the protocol.