MicroAgents: The Microservices of the Agentic Era

The microservices revolution gave us a hard-won set of principles: small services with well-defined contracts, owned by independent teams, composable into larger systems, replaceable without rewriting the world. The agentic AI era is rediscovering these lessons the hard way. Most enterprises today are building agents the way we built monoliths fifteen years ago: each agent a self-contained stack with its own conversation store, its own auth, its own observability, unable to talk to the agent built down the hall. There is a better pattern. We call it a MicroAgent, and it is to the agentic world what a microservice is to the API world. A MicroAgent is a lightweight, independently-deployable package consisting of two things: an MCP server that exposes domain-specific tools, and a prompt template that encodes domain expertise. That is the entire contract. No session management. No streaming code. No auth boilerplate. Those concerns belong to a shared Base Agent Service, the way platform concerns belong to a service mesh or API gateway. The Model Context Protocol is the API contract that makes this work. MCP is not just a tool-calling format. It is the service boundary that lets MicroAgents from different teams compose into super-agents through configuration alone. The Base Agent routes tool calls over MCP, fetches prompt templates via HTTP with conditional caching, and merges state updates from _meta fields in tool responses. This talk walks through the architecture: MicroAgents as units of ownership, MCP as the contract, shared infrastructure as the substrate, and the multi-agent composition patterns that emerge once these boundaries are clean.