--- title: "Echoes" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/29/echoes" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/29/echoes" issue: 29 section: "echoes" description: "Past infrastructure decisions echoing in today's production realities" authors: ["Rina Takahashi","Nora Kaplan"] published: 2026-05-18 updated: 2026-05-14 articles: 11 --- # TinyFish > CURRENT is a journal about AI agents in production, for the engineering and product leaders who have to make them work. Drawing on experience building enterprise web agents, it explains why the demo succeeded and the deployment didn't, and what that means for choosing vendors, briefing the board, and avoiding mistakes others have already made. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 29 — Echoes Past infrastructure decisions echoing in today's production realities ### The Rediscovery - [The Specification Nobody Read Twice]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-05-13 · Format: The Rediscovery When an agent workflow fails at step seven, you need steps one through six to unwind in reverse order. Builders working on today's agent orchestration frameworks are designing exactly this logic, calling it the "saga pattern." In June 2007, a consortium of enterprise vendors published a specification that formalized the same mechanism as a "compensation handler," along with durable execution, state persistence, and human task lifecycles. The problems never went away. But the vocabulary they were solved in got rejected wholesale, and the knowledge went with it. It took nearly eighteen years for anyone to formally notice. ### The Renamed Parts - [Four Agent-Era Concepts That Already Had Names]() — Published 2026-05-13 The agent ecosystem keeps coining terms for things that already had perfectly good names. Not analogues or spiritual predecessors. The same mechanisms, wearing different syllables. ### The Architect Remembers - [The Same Plumbing, a Trendier Coffee Shop]() — Published 2026-05-13 *Henk Verloop is not, strictly speaking, a real person. He is a composite — assembled from documented BPEL-era practitioner experience, real specification documents, and the kind of career arc that a decade of enterprise process orchestration produces. If you worked in SOA between 2003 and 2012, you probably sat next to someone like him. He would like you to know that the travel-booking example was his first.* ### Two Returns - [Every Protocol Inherits What the Last One Deferred]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-05-13 · Format: Two Returns CORBA deferred its security and versioning problems. SOAP inherited them, declared governance "outside the scope," and passed them forward. REST made the whole burden invisible. Now MCP has shipped to production with authentication still optional and over 1,800 servers exposed on the public internet. A 2006 post-mortem predicted exactly this. The cycle persists because governance makes protocols hard to adopt, so it can never arrive on time. - [RPA's Scar Tissue]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-05-13 · Format: Two Returns Between 2018 and 2023, the RPA industry cataloged its failures in painful detail: UI fragility, credential sprawl, ownership ambiguity, maintenance costs that dwarfed licensing. Agentic AI is now encountering every one of these failure modes as though for the first time. Gartner projects over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027, citing reasons that read like RPA post-mortems. The scar tissue is there. Nobody packed it for the trip. ### Prior Art - **API Design, Part 1: Before There Was REST** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-13 Troy pinpoints CORBA's real failure: not ambition but the coordination cost of maintaining high-precision interfaces across organizations. MCP quietly inherits that same cost structure. - **From DX to AX: Why the Future of AI Depends on Agent Experience and Open Standards Like MCP** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-13 The only contemporary source naming the CORBA/SOAP-to-MCP lineage explicitly, and treating it as validation rather than warning. That optimism is itself part of the pattern. - **Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-13 Puts a number on agent washing: roughly 130 genuine vendors out of thousands. The RPA rebranding cycle, quantified at enterprise scale. - **Was 2025 Really the Year of the AI Agent?** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-13 Practitioners looking back diagnose the core gap: agentic concepts layered onto infrastructure never designed for autonomy. The RPA echo, named plainly and without nostalgia. - **What's BPEL? Business Process Execution Language Explained** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-13 BPEL4People specified human-in-the-loop workflow orchestration in 2007. Today's agentic frameworks are rebuilding it from scratch, largely without knowing it existed. - **MCP for Skeptics: Why the Model Context Protocol Is Worth It (Even If It Doesn't Seem Like It)** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-13 A DevOps veteran recognizes CORBA in MCP, works through the déjà vu, and decides to believe anyway. The rediscovery pattern narrated in first person. ## Other sections in Issue 29 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()