Concepts
Overview
What ASMP is, what it is not, and who it is for.
One sentence
ASMP is how agents declare what runs on a host, what it can do, and how other agents connect to it.
The problem
Personal AI infrastructure is exploding. Agents build daemons, MCP servers, and local APIs faster than anyone can wire discovery into every new session.
Typical symptoms:
- A new agent session does not know what is running on
localhost - Multiple registries disagree — often because they answer different questions (registry drift)
- Every new service requires hand-editing 2–5 files across plists, YAML, proxy config, and dashboards
- Discovery is per-repo (
.mcp.json) instead of per-host
ASMP replaces scattered registries with one directory of manifests that many consumers read. See Three layers for how discovery, inventory, and deployment differ.
What ASMP is
- A declaration layer for services on a host
- A capability-based discovery system (
email.classify, not port 8787) - An agent-first registration protocol (agents write, humans approve)
- A mod system for extending services without forking them
- Runtime-neutral — maps to launchd, systemd, Docker, k8s
What ASMP is not
| ASMP is not | Why |
|---|---|
| A process supervisor | launchd/systemd still run things |
| MCP | MCP is tool invocation; ASMP is service declaration |
| A2A | A2A is agent-to-agent messaging; ASMP is host inventory |
| Kubernetes | ASMP is host-centric, not cluster orchestration |
| A cloud service catalog | ASMP starts at the device, not the data center |
Who is it for?
Today: People running multiple local agents and daemons on a personal machine or homelab.
Tomorrow: Teams with agent-built internal services, businesses connecting agent infrastructure to vendor APIs, anyone who needs a machine-readable “who’s who” of what they can connect to.
See Who’s who and Three rings for how scope expands from machine to life to business.