Agents & Tools7 October 2026, 14:10 UTC6 min read

Can a Cloud-Native Harness Make Agents Reliable Beyond the Desktop?

Stacklok, founded by Kubernetes creators Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, is betting on cloud-native agent infrastructure to solve reliability and scalability issues for enterprises. Its open-source project, Mecatl, decouples the agent loop from execution environments, session management, and tool calling, allowing it to run independently in the cloud—unlike most desktop-first harnesses. The company…

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Key points

Mecatl decouples agent loops from execution, session state, and tool calls for cloud-native scalability
Stacklok’s AI Gateway focuses on access control and cost management, not model routing
ToolHive and Mecatl are open-source; enterprise spine and AI Gateway are commercial products

Stacklok’s commercial focus is on an ‘enterprise spine’—a control plane for identity, authorization, and auditing—while its open-source ToolHive and Mecatl address smaller teams. The AI Gateway, still under development, prioritizes access control and cost management over model selection. McLuckie and Beda claim current solutions lack the infrastructure to scale for large organizations, citing banks and semiconductor firms as target customers. The pivot from supply chain security to agent infrastructure follows a $17.5 million Series A raised in 2023.

Full story from Latent Space · by Richard MacManusOpen source ↗