Why every engineering org needs an agentic registry

Agents and skills are multiplying inside engineering orgs faster than anyone is tracking them. In a recent live session, we walked through what's happening on the ground: the teams shipping the most agentic work are also the ones losing the thread fastest. We then showed how an agentic registry solves it, with a hands-on build of a skills registry and an agent registry in Port from scratch.

The agent sprawl problem

We see most engineering orgs are on a similar journey: When we polled our customers on what they wanted us to build next, an Agent & Skill Registry was the runaway top answer at 47%, nearly four times the next most-requested capability. 

Coding assistants are widely adopted. A few teams have started building agents in their local environments, shipping Slack bots, wiring up infrastructure agents, writing skills for their own workflows. The cutting edge is running agents in production with humans overseeing them.

Almost everyone gets stuck in the same place: agent sprawl. One team builds an SRE agent. Another team builds something nearly identical. Every team writes its own skills. Leadership has no idea what exists, what's safe to run, or what's already been solved somewhere else in the org. Duplication compounds, standards don't exist, and nobody can answer the most basic question: who can run what?

How an Agent Registry helps

A registry turns on the lights. In practice, that's three registries working together: a Skills Registry for every SKILL.md in your repos, an Agent Registry for every Bedrock, Azure Foundry, or Cursor agent your teams have deployed, and a registry for approved MCP servers.

• Auto-discovery: pull every agent and skill in automatically, with all the source metadata intact.
• Standardization: layer your own attributes on top through a flexible data model. Tag by use case, owning team, environment, lifecycle stage, or whatever your operations need.
• Governance: control who can read each asset, who can run it, which agents are cleared for production, which skills are scoped to a team versus shared company-wide.

From registry to autonomous SDLC

This is where the foundation matters. A standalone list of agents and skills is useful. A registry tied to your context lake, where every agent and skill is connected to the services, teams, and repos it belongs to, is something else entirely.

That connection is what lets you compose agents and skills into workflows. An incident kicks off and the right agent runs against the right service. A vulnerability lands and a skill loops over the repos that pull in the affected dependency. Each workflow runs against real ownership and architecture, not a generic dispatch.

It's also what makes governance real. The attributes you've discovered and added become the rules of access: which team can edit a skill, which agents are cleared to run in production, which skills are eligible to be company-wide versus scoped to one team. RBAC stops being a separate system bolted on the side and becomes a property of the registry itself.

See it in Action

In a recent live session, Matar Peles, Port's Field CTO, built both a skills and an agents registries. The agent registry was pulling agents from AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry. The Skills registry auto-discovered and ingested skills out of GitHub. We show how developers can then pull skills into Cursor from a central CLI to build agentic workflows. 

Check out the recording below for a hands-on demo of the entire process:

[embed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dyb13Ot5wA]

Try it for yourself

Check out this step-by-step guide for building an agent registry in Port with AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry out of the box.

Start building, or book a demo if you'd rather walk through it with us.