# The Broken Contract
// APIs were built on a simple promise:
That's the quiet contract we've relied on to build modern software. APIs don't argue, hesitate, or negotiate. They were designed for determinism.
But agents break that contract. They talk back. They stream partial thoughts, revise themselves mid-sentence, call external tools, and sometimes wander off entirely.
> STATUS: Infrastructure mismatch detected.
# The Infrastructure Gap
## APIs Assume Silence — Agents Don't
APIs are built on clean boundaries: every request is independent, every response is final.
Agents think out loud. They stream, stall, self-correct, and chase dead ends. An "API wrapper" isn't enough—you need infrastructure that handles conversation, not just payloads.
## Stateless Systems — Stateful Agents
Our deployment stacks were designed for statelessness. A load balancer doesn't care what happened in the last request.
Agents carry memory, context, and history. Treat them as stateless, and you break their reasoning. Treat them as stateful, and your infrastructure suddenly feels out of date.
## Logs Aren't Enough — You Need Traces
When a microservice fails: 500 error, stack trace, retry.
When an agent fails, it's rarely a crash—it's a spiral: wrong reasoning, looping calls, hallucinated outputs. You need traces of the agent's thinking, tools it invoked, and decisions it took.
// without knowing where the fire is.
## Success vs. Spiral
Monitoring assumes binary states: success or failure. Agents live in the grey zone. They can be "running" but going in circles. They can produce output that's technically valid but semantically useless.
Traditional monitoring can't interpret that ambiguity. Production systems need new guardrails and observability.
# The Paradigm Shift
## Agents Aren't Just Functions — They're Entities
Agents aren't just functions you embed in your software. They're entities you maintain alongside it.
Sure, you can stuff an agent directly into your product. But then you inherit a mess: every update, every enhancement, every bug-fix means redeploying your whole app. Monitoring becomes a hunt through mixed logs.
In practice, it's often cleaner to run agents separately—as their own services. That way you can monitor, update, and improve them independently.
## Agents Aren't Just Workflows — They're Negotiators
A workflow engine runs a checklist. It knows the steps, executes them in order, and stops.
Agents negotiate between options: "Should I call this tool or that one? Should I retry or change strategy?"
That decision-making is powerful, but it breaks the workflow assumption that outcomes are predictable. Infrastructure has to support branching, retries, and reasoning loops as first-class behaviors—not as errors to be patched over.
## Scaling Isn't Just Compute — It's Orchestration
Scaling APIs is easy: throw more servers at the problem.
Scaling agents is different. Ten agents don't just run ten times faster—they need to share context, coordinate, and avoid stepping on each other's outputs.
Scaling becomes an orchestration problem: distributing reasoning, not just requests.
# What We Need
// The pattern is obvious:
We don't just need "agent wrappers."
We need new infrastructure.
Infrastructure that treats agents as first-class citizens of the software stack.
# Our Vision
> ./agent_infrastructure --init
RunAgent is building the infrastructure layer that agents deserve. Not a framework. Not a wrapper. A complete runtime environment designed from the ground up for agentic systems.
## What We're Building
- ✓ Conversational Infrastructure: Native support for streaming, self-correction, and tool orchestration
- ✓ Stateful by Design: Memory, context, and history as first-class primitives
- ✓ Reasoning Traces: Full visibility into agent decision-making and tool invocation
- ✓ Intelligent Monitoring: Detect spirals, hallucinations, and semantic failures
- ✓ Service Modularity: Deploy agents independently, integrate seamlessly
- ✓ Orchestration at Scale: Coordinate reasoning across distributed agent systems
Build agents. Not infrastructure.