Building an AI Commerce Orchestrator in Rust

Protocols and patterns are emerging that let AI agents interact with commerce systems - product search, checkout flows, inventory, order management. For that to work reliably we need middleware that orchestrates complex interactions between AI systems and traditional commerce APIs. I built commerce-orchestrator for that role: an open-source Rust project that sits between AI agents (or any client) and commerce backends as a deterministic orchestration layer. The Problem Modern commerce stacks are complex. Simple user actions often require coordination across catalog, inventory, pricing, payment, and order systems. When an AI agent tries to perform the same flow - discover products, check availability, compare pricing, initiate checkout, confirm order - we hit a mismatch: AI systems are stateless and probabilistic; commerce systems need deterministic, transactional flows. Without an orchestration layer you get inconsistent state, duplicated requests, partial transactions, unreliable retr