Spore: A Micro Agent Platform Built in Rust
A five-part series on building Spore — a micro agent platform where every agent is a stateless runtime plus a declarative skill file, and a self-bootstrapping factory builds the rest.
Spore: A Micro Agent Platform Built in Rust
AI agents have a monolith problem.
Most agent architectures today look like a single massive system prompt stuffed with routing logic, domain knowledge, business rules, and output formatting — all tangled together in one completion. It works for demos. It breaks in production. When something goes wrong, you can't tell if the failure was routing, business logic, or formatting, because all three happened inside the same black box.
Spore is a micro agent platform that applies the single-responsibility principle to AI agents. Every agent is composed of exactly two things: a generic runtime — a statically compiled Rust binary with zero domain knowledge — and a skill file — a declarative YAML manifest that defines what the agent knows, what tools it can call, and how it responds. Swap the skill file, get a different agent. The runtime never changes.
The platform ships as 1-5MB Docker images. No GPU required. Hundreds of agents on commodity hardware. Skill files are text — diffable, PR-reviewable, rollbackable. When something breaks, you know exactly which agent produced the answer.
The real trick: Spore bootstraps itself. Two seed agents — a skill writer and a tool coder — form a factory that produces new agents from plain-language descriptions. Describe what you need, and the factory writes the skill file, implements the missing tools, and deploys the agent. The system builds itself.
The Tech Stack
- rig-core — Agent execution engine with compile-time tool validation
- rmcp — Official Rust MCP SDK for tool interoperability
- axum — HTTP layer
- tokio — Async runtime
The Series
| # | Post | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Problem with Monolithic Agents | Why current agent architectures are fragile, untestable, and hitting the same wall backend services hit fifteen years ago. |
| 2 | Runtime + Skill File: The Anatomy of a Micro Agent | The two-part unit — a stateless Rust binary plus a declarative YAML manifest. The Lambda analogy for AI agents. |
| 3 | The Self-Bootstrapping Factory | Two seed agents that build everything else. Describe a capability, get a deployable agent. The system builds itself. |
| 4 | Economics and Operations at Scale | Sub-5MB containers, $0.002/request, PR-reviewable skill files, and why Rust gives you wins that Python frameworks can't. |
| 5 | One Factory, Infinite Agents | The factory builds four completely different AI systems — customer support, e-commerce, knowledge base, DevOps — with zero hand-written agent code. |
Spore is an open-source project. Follow along on GitHub or find me on X, LinkedIn, or GitHub.