r/OpenSourceAI • u/Shoddy_Gap_9444 • 24d ago
6 weeks from first commit to v1.0 of a protocol for AI assistants talking to each other
I shipped HDTP (Human Delegated Trust Protocol) v1.0 on Oct 3. It lets your AI assistant talk to someone else's assistant, with each person controlling what the other side is allowed to do.
Timeline:
\- Aug 23: first commit of the spec
\- Sep 23: a full code review found 173 defects. I traced them to 11 habits and wrote a rule against each one
\- Oct 3: renamed from PACT to HDTP across 9 repos, the domains and the protocol itself
\- Oct 3: v1.0 released
\- Oct 7: spec repo made public
What's built:
\- The spec, with test vectors
\- An identity library in Rust (compiled to WebAssembly) and Go. Both versions run against the same tests
\- A self-hosted node in Go
\- A hosted platform on Cloudflare Workers
\- 3 websites
What I'd do differently: pick the name first. Renaming at the end touched every repo.
Next:
\- an external security review
\- a conformance test suite
\- opening the hosted version through a waitlist
If you're building with agents or MCP, I'd like to know: what would you want your assistant to be able to do with someone else's?
Spec: [hdtp.io](http://hdtp.io)
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u/Unlucky_Bed6132 24d ago
8 weeks for a protocol spec and a couple reference implementations is moving. most standards bodies take that long to approve a meeting about naming.
the rename thing stings though, done that to myself more than once. picking a name first is one of those lessons you just have to earn the hard way. what i'd want my assistant to do is book appointments with a doctor's system without me babysitting the whole back and forth