AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Remember when everyone was shipping microservices without service discovery, circuit breakers, or distributed tracing? Agents are in that exact phase right now. Everyone's building them. Almost nobody is thinking about the infrastructure underneath. We've been deploying production agents across 120+ microservices. Here's the stack that's emerging: Runtime — containerized execution, session persistence, workspace snapshots. Solved-ish, mostly duct tape. Memory — RAG had a good run. It's not enough. Tiered memory — short-term, long-term with semantic/episodic strategies, agents deciding what to remember and forget. Observability — you can't tail -f an agent. Execution traces, reasoning chains, confidence signals — agents need their own observability stack. Testing — the biggest gap. Unit testing non-deterministic behavior, regression testing prompt changes, knowing your agent got worse before users do. Skills and tools — MCP and skill definitions as the standard interface layer — the REST APIs of the agent era. Context engineering — what the agent knows at decision time. The new performance tuning. Guardrails and auth — scoped credentials, budget limits, knowing when to stop. Least-privilege for agents. Orchestration — single vs. multi-agent, choreography vs. orchestration. Same tradeoffs as microservices, new failure modes. This talk maps the stack, draws the parallels to how we eventually got microservices right, and calls out what's still painfully missing.