A field guide to the agent-framework landscape — from LangChain and the first wave, through the two layers of a harness and the rise of loop engineering, to where the frameworks diverge. And why Go Micro’s answer is that an agent is a service.
The first wave of agent frameworks put a model in a loop. The harder problem is operating that loop — and that’s what Go Micro is: the harness around the agent.
From the scaling pressures that produced microservices, through Kubernetes and the service mesh, to AI agents — fifteen years of evolution, what actually endured, and why the future belongs to agents.
What if every service had an agent responsible for it? Not embedded in the service, but created to manage its lifecycle. A design for distributed AI agents on top of microservices.
The path from API gateway to MCP to LLM tools was shorter than you’d think — because services were always self-describing.