Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An AI coding agent holds many conversations at once. Not only is the user prompting it, the agent also talks to the IDE, showing diffs and asking before it touches a file. At the same time it talks to tools, pulling a failing build or querying a database. Two open protocols standardize those conversations. This guide compares ACP vs MCP in practical terms: what each protocol does and when each applies. ACP (Agent Client Protocol) connects a code editor to an AI coding agent.