Stacklok's Mecatl: a Kubernetes-style cloud-native harness for agents
Stacklok, founded by Kubernetes creators Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, pivoted from software supply chain security to Kubernetes-based agentic infrastructure. Its open source “cloud-native harness” Mecatl, started in June, separates the agent loop from tool execution, session management and memory; the companion open source project ToolHive runs and governs MCP servers on Kubernetes. The company says its AI Gateway is not yet open sourced but is on the roadmap, with an “enterprise spine” control plane as the commercial product.
If cloud-native harnesses take hold, enterprises could centrally manage and govern coding agents on Kubernetes instead of leaving code and context on individual laptops.
At a high level, coding agents have a basic architecture: an LLM calls tools in a loop, while carrying forward the required context. Since that’s easiest to implement locally, many coding agents started out as terminal tools and then desktop apps (Claude Code famously began as a CLI tool). But as the open laptop meme illustrates, modern agent harnesses have frustrating limitations if they’re not able to be managed in the cloud.
Since 2025, both OpenAI and Anthropic have been trying to shift their harnesses more into the cloud — but with varying levels of success. The challenges include keeping sessions reliable, isolating tool execution and preserving context.
This sounds a lot like container orchestration in the early 2010s, from which emerged the open source Kubernetes in 2014. Kubernetes, developed by Google, became the dominant open source system for deploying and managing cloud applications at scale — it kickstarted the “cloud native” era of computing.
Kubernetes uses control loops to keep applications running, recover from failures, and scale when needed. What if coding agents could be managed in the same way?
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