I decided to try out a more streamlined approach and started building Ridge. It gives agents common operations for accessing data and running commands across different environments, through MCP, a CLI, or Python. Local, SSH, Docker, and S3 are the initial providers. Copying a model from the bucket to the GPU box is one operation. There's also support for giving subagents narrower access and coordinating operations on shared resources with locks.
I'm curious who else has run into this. What were you trying to do, and what did you end up building to make it work? Would appreciate feedback on the approach.