Kubernetes creators' Stacklok rebuilds the coding agent harness for the cloud with open-source Mecatl
Latent Space · rss · 2026-10-07
Latent Space interviews Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, two Kubernetes creators, on their startup Stacklok's bet that agent harnesses will follow the same path as container orchestration: from desktop tools to cloud-native infrastructure.
Mecatl (open-source cloud-native harness):
- Decouples the agent loop from client, model provider, state store, and execution environment; session state moves from local JSONL files into manageable systems;
- Rationale: enterprises want to govern agent interactions like email—code and context (the IP) sitting on desktops can't be managed;
- A "lift and shift" to VMs/containers doesn't solve agent lifecycle or safe quiescing, hence a ground-up redesign.
Other products:
- ToolHive: open-source platform for running and governing MCP servers, evolved into a Kubernetes-based gateway, registry, and operator;
- AI Gateway (not yet open-sourced): access control, budgets, reporting, and provider routing for banks, semiconductor firms, and telcos—deliberately excluding semantic model routing, which they argue belongs in the harness layer;
- Business model: open-source components plus a commercial "enterprise spine" control plane for identity, authorization, policy, and auditing.
The overarching goal: help enterprises reduce dependency on frontier labs (Codex, Claude Code, Copilot), much as Kubernetes reduced cloud vendor lock-in.
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