We've Seen This Before: What SOA Teaches Us About APIs in the Age of Agents

In the first article in this series, I argued that agents do not replace APIs. They expose the quality of the APIs underneath them.

That should feel familiar, because we have been here before.

The current wave of AI agents, MCP, and tool-driven architectures follows a recognisable pattern. We are being told that systems will become more composable, more interoperable, and more reusable. Software will call other software dynamically. Capabilities will be discovered and invoked at runtime. Integration will become less rigid because the caller can decide what to use as it goes.

That sounds new because the tooling is new. The architecture story is not.

We said much the same thing about Service-Oriented Architecture.