Can a Cloud-Native Harness Make Agents Reliable Beyond the Desktop?

Stacklok, the company founded by Kubernetes co-creators Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, is betting that coding agent harnesses can be managed the way Kubernetes manages cloud applications. Its product, Mecatl, is described as a "cloud-native harness" and began in June as an open source project on GitHub. The name is pronounced "MEH-kah-tl" and comes from an Aztec word meaning cord or rope.

Stacklok raised a $17.5 million Series A in 2023 from Accel, Madrona and Bain Capital. The company initially focused on software supply chain security before recently pivoting to Kubernetes-based agentic solutions.

McLuckie said cloud-native in this context is primarily about "moving the locus of value from the desktop to the cloud," referring to enterprise value since code and context are often derived from local environments. Beda said "that's where the IP sits," adding that bringing such work under management is harder when it sits on a desktop.

Mecatl keeps the agent loop independent of the client, model provider, state store and execution environment. Beda said desktop-first harnesses often begin the loop, local execution and session state inside the same process. He said a "lift and shift" approach to the cloud tends to create issues around an agent's lifecycle or being able to quiesce it, and that Mecatl was rethought from the ground up to run in the cloud. The project is designed to extend beyond a single-user, local harness into infrastructure enterprises can operate centrally.

Beda likened this to enterprise email management, saying agent interactions at an enterprise belong to that enterprise and will need to be managed and governed like email. McLuckie said a motivation is helping large enterprises lessen dependency on frontier labs and hyperscalers such as Codex, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot.

After its pivot, Stacklok built ToolHive, an open source platform for running and governing MCP servers that expanded from desktop Docker containers into a Kubernetes-based gateway, registry and operator helper. It also offers an AI Gateway, not yet open sourced, focused on access control, budgets, reporting and provider routing rather than task-based model selection. McLuckie said most customers are banks, semiconductor companies and telcos. He described the commercial product as "the enterprise spine, the control plane that ties them all together."