Before the tech world coined the term "microservices," the UNIX operating system had already perfected the concept. Its philosophy, forged in the 1970s, was deceptively simple: build small, focused programs that do one thing well, and connect them through a universal messaging system—the OS pipe . This created a powerful, composable architecture where complex workflows emerged from simple, stateless components communicating via standard input and output.
This decades-old wisdom is now experiencing a renaissance in the age of AI, with designs that share a UNIX-like faith in composition as a foundational design pattern, in favor of something resilient by design: pipelines of specialized agents, each performing a clear function and communicating via lightweight messaging.
We take this old philosophy and make it new again.