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Agent registry

The term covers two different things — a discovery directory of running agents, and a versioned source of truth for agent definitions.

Last verified

An agent registry is a catalog of the agents an organization runs, but the term is used for two different things and it is worth telling them apart. A discovery registry answers "what agents exist right now and how do I call one" — it holds running endpoints and metadata, and is what A2A- and MCP-style directories provide. A source-of-truth registry answers "what is this agent, exactly, and which version is live" — it holds the definitions themselves, versioned, and the runtime reads from it. Google Cloud's Agent Registry and the Microsoft 365 Agent Registry are examples of the first meaning; neither claims to be the second.

Which one you need

Discovery matters once many independent services must find each other at runtime. A source of truth matters as soon as you have to answer "which version of the agent produced this output" — a question that comes up the first time an agent's behavior changes and someone asks why.

How Vocion implements it

Vocion is the source-of-truth kind. Agents, teams, skills, playbooks, missions, and workflows are authored as YAML and Markdown in git and applied to Postgres; the full authored-object table, including each entity's schema symbol and runtime mount, is in docs/object-model.md. An agent definition lives at agents/<slug>.yaml (docs/entities/agent.md) and is surfaced at /api/v1/agents and /dashboard/agents. A base pack of seven default agents ships inside vocion-core at packages/core/templates/base/agents/ at pack version core@2.0.0, with a review-ops layer adding two more in review; a workspace inherits from it with extends: core@<version>, rather than forking the files. Other systems reach a Vocion agent over MCP (POST /api/mcp) or A2A — a calling surface, not a service-discovery product.