OmniNode's founder, a veteran iOS developer who turned to AI agents after developing neuropathy, shares how he built a contract-driven AI agent orchestration platform. The post details the migration from Redis Streams to Redpanda as the event bus grew beyond 100 topic types across 12 repositories. The core engineering challenge was topic naming drift — silent failures caused by hyphen/underscore mismatches, pluralization differences, and version suffix inconsistencies. The solution: a single ContractTopicExtractor that reads topic names exclusively from contract.yaml files, enforced at three independent call sites (pre-deploy CI, runtime boot, and post-boot validation). Redpanda was chosen for its Kafka API compatibility and low operational footprint, enabling the same broker to run in local dev, CI, and production without fake broker paths.
