The Future of Open-Source Agentic Systems: Toward Prompt-Driven Modular Development

Agentic systems are advancing quickly, but the practice by which they are developed severely limits how fast they can progress. Monolithic repositories raise the bar for contributors and overload core teams, while plugin mechanisms lack systematic design and lose forward compatibility as the surrounding system evolves. Taking into account how software engineering practice is itself changing in the agent era, we envision what future agentic systems should look like and propose a prompt-driven, modularized approach. We argue that prompts should be preserved and published alongside code, and that agentic systems should be decomposed into modules decoupled through a micro-kernel. We sketch a potential design, identify the gaps that remain, and lay out a roadmap for future agent development.