I started writing about API design in 2012. Back then the question was how to make an API good enough that a developer would pick it, learn it quickly, and keep using it. Since then the question has barely changed, but the reader has. The consumer is no longer only a developer reading documentation at a desk. Increasingly it is an agent, working from whatever it can discover and understand at runtime. ...
Ask an agent, “What’s the weather in Boston?” and it feels like one step. You typed a question. You got an answer. Underneath, that one question is a small distributed system. Several components, owned by different parties, exchange messages over networks that can be slow, wrong, or down. Each hop carries context, identity, and risk. None of this is exotic. It is the same class of problem architects have handled for decades. The difference is that most agent demos hide it. ...
I’m writing this a few days after the end of AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose. The Amsterdam edition ran a couple of weeks earlier, so this was the second stop of the first year. I spent two days in sessions, hallway conversations, and the Solo.io booth. I recorded a short recap video on the last day, and this post expands on it. One disclosure up front: I work at Solo.io. Several of the announcements below are ours. I have marked them in their own section so you can weigh them accordingly. ...
There is a strange debate happening in the infrastructure world right now. As enterprises begin moving from AI experiments to production agentic systems, everyone wants to own the layer between agents, models, tools, data, and applications. Data platforms want to own it. Cloud providers want to own it. AI infrastructure vendors want to own it. And, increasingly, API infrastructure vendors are showing up with a surprisingly strong claim: We have already been here. ...