Agents Are Where Microservices Were in 2015 — Roberto Milev & Uday Kanagala, Navan

Roberto Milev and Uday Kanagala from Navan discuss the challenges and emerging best practices in building and operating AI agents, drawing parallels with microservices. They highlight the shift to stateful runtimes, innovative memory and context management using 'skills,' and crucial solutions for observability and testing non-deterministic systems. A central theme is the critical need for robust authorization and guardrails, given the blurring line of agentic action, and a preference for mastering single-agent loops before scaling to complex orchestrations. They conclude by outlining the solved and unsolved problems, with cost and debugging remaining significant hurdles.