The first time I got two agents talking across different network environments without any manual networking setup, I genuinely sat there for a second waiting for something to break. It didn't. NAT has been the background tax on distributed systems forever. You write the application logic, it works perfectly in local dev, and then you try to run it across two machines on different networks and suddenly you're debugging ICE candidates, setting up a VPN, punching holes in firewalls, or just giving up and routing everything through a relay you built yourself. None of that is the actual work. It's overhead on overhead. Pilot Protocol makes this overhead disappear, and I want to be specific about what that actually looks like across different deployment environments. What You're Usually Fighting If you've run distributed agent systems before, you know the production checklist. Cloud VM gets a public IP, that's fine. Your dev laptop is behind your router's NAT, so you need a tunnel or a VPN to make it reachable.…