--- schema: 1 type: video title: >- Agents Are Where Microservices Were in 2015 — Roberto Milev & Uday Kanagala, Navan description: >- Tell a travel agent to book a flight whenever the fare drops below 200 dollars and something awkward follows. When it fires two weeks later, who made that purchase? Roberto Milev and Uday Kanagala keep returning to that blurring, because Navan sells travel and expense management and the answer decides what authorization even means. An agent may act on behalf of a user or under its own service account, and the old model of a user or a service principal does not survive contact with either. Their guardrails run before and after every tool call rather than at the edge. The framing is that agents are where microservices sat in 2015, when the sensible advice was that if you can build a well structured monolith you probably should not reach for microservices. The same holds here for reaching past a single agentic loop. Navan runs one master agent that progressively loads skills, treating a skill as the unit of context, pluggable and testable on its own. Logs stop working when an agent emits this much thinking, so hooks intercept each tool call and emit the goal, the reasoning and a confidence score, which lets an inferred answer be routed to a human. Testing a nondeterministic system means scoring trajectories rather than asserting outputs. Cost remains genuinely unsolved. Speaker info: Roberto Milev: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertomilev/ Uday Kanagala: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/udaybhanuprasad Timestamps: 0:00 - The microservices bandwagon, and what it taught 1:25 - A reference architecture starting to crystallize 2:34 - Runtime, and agents being stateful by nature 3:42 - Memory, from RAG to episodic 6:04 - Skills as the unit of context 7:16 - Why logs stop working for agents 8:24 - Hooks, traces, and confidence scores 9:32 - Testing something nondeterministic 10:44 - Scoring trajectories instead of outputs 13:04 - Who actually bought the flight 14:15 - One master agent, or many 15:29 - What is solved, and what is not 17:48 - Cost, replay, and emerging standards --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/32nrHU6zHU8-youtube-0b98a6ac067ca831c5fe Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/agents-are-where-microservices-were-in-2015-roberto-13617426fbb8 markdown: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/video/agents-are-where-microservices-were-in-2015-roberto-13617426fbb8.md llms: null parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T04:16:40.618Z' language: null children: [] videoId: 32nrHU6zHU8 durationSeconds: 1168 publishedAt: '2026-08-29T16:30:28.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 25 endSeconds: 88 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=25' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 88 endSeconds: 101 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=88' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 101 endSeconds: 155 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=101' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 155 endSeconds: 168 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=155' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 168 endSeconds: 224 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=168' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 237 endSeconds: 371 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=237' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 237 endSeconds: 371 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=237' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 237 endSeconds: 371 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=237' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 381 endSeconds: 439 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=381' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 439 endSeconds: 450 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=439' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 450 endSeconds: 506 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=450' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 516 endSeconds: 572 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=516' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 583 endSeconds: 652 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=583' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 663 endSeconds: 787 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=663' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 663 endSeconds: 787 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=663' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 15 text: null startSeconds: 787 endSeconds: 800 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=787' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 16 text: null startSeconds: 800 endSeconds: 860 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=800' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 17 text: null startSeconds: 860 endSeconds: 872 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=860' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 18 text: null startSeconds: 872 endSeconds: 929 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=872' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 19 text: null startSeconds: 940 endSeconds: 1081 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=940' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 20 text: null startSeconds: 940 endSeconds: 1081 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=940' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 21 text: null startSeconds: 940 endSeconds: 1081 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=940' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 22 text: null startSeconds: 1091 endSeconds: 1168 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/32nrHU6zHU8?t=1091' heldReason: rights --- # Agents Are Where Microservices Were in 2015 — Roberto Milev & Uday Kanagala, Navan Tell a travel agent to book a flight whenever the fare drops below 200 dollars and something awkward follows. When it fires two weeks later, who made that purchase? Roberto Milev and Uday Kanagala keep returning to that blurring, because Navan sells travel and expense management and the answer decides what authorization even means. An agent may act on behalf of a user or under its own service account, and the old model of a user or a service principal does not survive contact with either. Their guardrails run before and after every tool call rather than at the edge. The framing is that agents are where microservices sat in 2015, when the sensible advice was that if you can build a well structured monolith you probably should not reach for microservices. The same holds here for reaching past a single agentic loop. Navan runs one master agent that progressively loads skills, treating a skill as the unit of context, pluggable and testable on its own. Logs stop working when an agent emits this much thinking, so hooks intercept each tool call and emit the goal, the reasoning and a confidence score, which lets an inferred answer be routed to a human. Testing a nondeterministic system means scoring trajectories rather than asserting outputs. Cost remains genuinely unsolved. Speaker info: Roberto Milev: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertomilev/ Uday Kanagala: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/udaybhanuprasad Timestamps: 0:00 - The microservices bandwagon, and what it taught 1:25 - A reference architecture starting to crystallize 2:34 - Runtime, and agents being stateful by nature 3:42 - Memory, from RAG to episodic 6:04 - Skills as the unit of context 7:16 - Why logs stop working for agents 8:24 - Hooks, traces, and confidence scores 9:32 - Testing something nondeterministic 10:44 - Scoring trajectories instead of outputs 13:04 - Who actually bought the flight 14:15 - One master agent, or many 15:29 - What is solved, and what is not 17:48 - Cost, replay, and emerging standards --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/32nrHU6zHU8-youtube-0b98a6ac067ca831c5fe Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/agents-are-where-microservices-were-in-2015-roberto-13617426fbb8 · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.