Building a Sustainable Future in APIs with Kin Lane

[00:00:00] Hello everybody. Welcome to APOs You Won't Hate. I'm Phil Sturgeon and I'm really excited this time to be joined by the Very Kin Lane, also known as the API Evangelist. How you doing kin? I'm doing very well today. Beautiful. Sunny day here in New York City. You're in New York City. I'm so jealous. I used to live there and I don't now.
It makes me mad. How is it It misses you. It misses you and you should come back. You, me, directly told me directly. Have you got, have you got ice all up in New York City or are they staying outta there? Uh, I think they're kind of weighing, they're staying out for right now, but it's coming. I'm sure at some point here, I think they just picked other, picked on other second tier cities or still big, but to test things out and then, then they're gonna come here.
I just feel like they're, they're gonna get to like the Bronx and wish they didn't. It's gonna be real interesting when they get there. Yeah. It'll be, it'll be, yeah. It's not, it's not gonna be pretty, but, oops. Let's go back to Portland. This was a bad choice. Everybody loves to hate Portland, so Portland's a good testing ground [00:01:00] when you're, you're, you're putting hate out there.
Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's not exactly what we're here to talk about, but Excellent. Uh, it's been a while since I've seen you in person. You're at all the API conferences and I don't do those anymore, but, uh, Hey, what, what are you up to at the moment? So like you were super involved in open API for a bit.
You were involved Postman for a bit. Like what's going on? What have you been up to? Yeah, so it has been a few years I would say. So I think when I last. Worked with you and talked. We, I was a co-director of the Open API initiative. Um, I think at the time I was starting up the Postman Open Technologies program and kind of doing the.
I don't know the, how do you, how do you articulate the, the startup plus open source and open standards you invest in and you build homes for these places. And, and so I invested in open API Async, A-P-I-J-S-O schema, very keen to invest in spectral baby of yours. Mm-hmm. And, uh. And you and I kind of, you [00:02:00] know, connected again around.
I mean, we've been on the conference circuit for a while, but I did four, finished four years at Postman and then I left and spent a year at Bloomberg standing up an API governance program there here in New York City. And spectral was, was pivotal to that and still remains. But now I've left and I'm doing a startup on on API integration and consumption and automation.
That's very cool. Firstly, what the heck is Bloomberg doing with Spectral? They just got big APIs and they wanted a style guide or what's going on there? I've not heard about that one. Yeah, so I sprawling organization, lots of business domains that are very separate, like legally compliant, like buy side, can't talk to sell side.
The government people can't talk. Like there's some legit reasons why there's different groups. Not all the other BS reasons. The organizations we've worked in don't talk to each other. That is really interesting. 'cause usually it's just like, this team is in Singapore or some shit, or, or it's just like, that team is run by Gary and I fucking hate Gary, but like the, the [00:03:00] lack of communication between teams is usually not like legally mandated wherever I've been, even, even at WeWork as much of a shit state as that was.
That's quite funny. Yeah. No, and it's so, it's significant, but then there's still other, you know, common organizational issues, team topology. Tribal, you know, I really prefer to use the word tribe 'cause that's how people tend, not just at Bloomberg, everywhere, I think tend to each other. But, so map the landscape.
Here's all the open API, uh, swagger, you know, it was half and half. And then come up with a base rule set and then I, you know, your, your rule set guidance out there. That is the always the place to start with. Um, and, and kind of assemble that base set of rules that comes with stoplight. But I think you, you've had several stories that have expanded on it in meaningful ways.
Yeah. And so applied that base set of rules. Then set in motion, also governance of async, API, on top of that for the event driven as well as GraphQL. GraphQL was more traditional [00:04:00] linting and schema linting rather than, uh, spectral. But, uh, yeah, just applying a, a common sense rule set. I mean, minimum viable bar rule set.
Across a 25,000 person org, you know, several hundred APIs. And then, uh, watch the, the chaos that ensues and all the reasons why people can't comply in the design reviews. Oh, man, we gotta get this out the door right now, man. Yeah. We ain't got time for this stuff. You know, you've heard all the reasons we gotta, we gotta push non-standard garbage to production right now that, that we'll be trapped with for a million years.
But yeah, we couldn't possibly wait another day to fix that before it goes out. That would be bad. Yeah, that is, that is stressful. Yeah. But, but they're, they're doing the good work there. They're continuing, they're automating around it. Yeah. Very nice. And then I think going ahead first into this whole AI realm that everyone else is being forced into.
So, so, yeah, but I left. Been almost a year now, and I'm doing my own startup now, trying to make sense of this madness and, but with the level of [00:05:00] control, I think that you, me and you and our old curmudgeonly aged demand and need, otherwise, I was out the door of tech going to look at do something entirely other like you have, so, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. Most of my brain right now is focused on the fact that we have spent two years waiting for our next bit of land to come through, and as soon as like. One thing needs to happen. We've got half a million pounds just sitting in a bank account waiting to be given to this person, and as soon as they like do one thing, it's literally like send one email.
We can just buy it. It's so fucking frustrating. We've been there for like three months and what I wanna do is go and like work with the beavers that are already on that site and design like a sweet habitat for them. They're gonna love it. I'm gonna love working with them. It's gonna be a nice time. But instead, yeah, just like hitting refresh on my inbox consistently is pretty stressful.
But when I'm not hitting refresh on my inbox, I, well, when I am hitting refresh on my inbox, I'm seeing emails hitting the protector [00:06:00] inbox. Um, such as Rick from Current company. I won't mention. Just absolutely convincing me that I need this new AI startup, this AI startup is going to. Read all of the emails that hit my inbox in my own voice.
I know y'all think I love the sound of my own voice, but god dammit, I actually do not wanna hear it all that much. Not, not like reading an email from an asshole in my voice as well is a weird pitch. So I get pretty frustrated with people sending these AI pitches sometimes to a PO he won't hate. Fair enough.
You want us to talk about it, sending it to Protect Earth. However, does my head in, so I got this email the other day. I responded with, I'm not investing any time or effort thinking about the AI bubble, especially not on this email address you scraped online somewhere. If you thought about the address you were contacting, you would've noticed that email is, uh, the email address is a climate and nature charity, which is being absolutely devastated by compute, burning slot machines like the one you're working on.
I'd recommend you look for another job opportunity promptly and consider getting into Green Tech. Linked to my article about [00:07:00] Green Tech, what is that and how to get into it if you'd like to do something constructive instead. Warm regards. Right. Um, so I am not necessarily the most reasonable person when it comes to talking about ai.
Now, I, I can back all this up with a long chat. We can talk for fucking six hours about why it's a stupid idea. But I did really appreciate your blog post the other day where you had a few more useful things to say compared to that nonsense that I just wrote, to that poor person who's just trying to make a wage.
You wrote, I entered into these conversations in the early part of the summer with much empathy for people doing artificial intelligence without much empathy for people doing artificial intelligence. You were the same as me and have come out the other side with a lot more empathy for what's happening and where we are headed.
I still feel strongly that AI is overhyped and overblown and obfuscates some very dangerous realities around labor, climate change and copyright. But as I've learned more, I've softened the edge on how I talk with folks about this moment that we are in, and specifically regarding how we are going to address what is next without jeopardizing what we've already built.
Now that [00:08:00] is pretty well worded. Do you wanna expand on that a whole bunch? Like what? What have you learned that makes you not think that everyone working on AI stuff is just being a silly money grabbing nutty. Well, I mean, I think the bullet points in that the, the labor, the job precarity kind of part of this, like talking to people, like when you talk to people behind the scenes, they're like, look, I'm totally with you.
I'm, I'm, I'm anti ai. Please don't publish that or share that or let anybody know that. But, um, I have to, like, this is my job and I, I just can't afford losing my job right now. And, and so, you know, the AI thing from squeezing white. Mail mostly, or you know, in, in Silicon Valley all the way to Africa, to South America, that spectrum where, you know, some of us on the upper end are making, you know, a quarter of a million dollars a year all the way down to making a quarter.
You know, every couple, you know, tasks that they do or respond to that labor squeeze is kind, is [00:09:00] real, you know, and mm-hmm. I mean, I think if the powers that be want, they would want us all like, you know, in, you know. Working just online, you know, for minimum viable and kind of that Uber, you know, price surge.
Kind of like, oh, here's a demand to work. Click, click, click. And, and we'll make sure you can barely eat and you won't have healthcare. You know? So people are genuinely scared. And, and, and I don't wanna all, and once people talk to me, it's similar to you. You're not as scary as you, as you sound, you know, you're, you're actually a pretty compassionate guy.
Once you talk to people and they realize I'm not as scary mean, um, I wanna hear like, what are their challenges? And they don't wanna lose their job in their healthcare, especially in the US healthcare, you know, like, don't. You lose that and then now there's, you're gonna lose your H one V ones. You're not gonna be, be here as an immigrant.
So there's, there's a lot of other things that get in the way of me just being a complete asshole right up front. That's funny. Yeah. I mean, obviously the, um, in most companies there's the suits who, who don't really know [00:10:00] anything about anything, who have just heard that like this is the future. Um, 'cause there are, there, there's, there's two types of suits.
There's the ones. That know that this is bullshit and are pushing it to make money, and there's the ones that. Don't know that this is bullshit and are desperately trying to keep up so that they can make some money. I mean, that's just, that's just capitalism right there. But I feel like, yeah, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of people in the C-suite just being like, wow, AI is gonna be the thing we all gonna do.
Ai, shove it in everywhere, blah. Make some money. And, um, they're all British. Even if it's in Silicon Valley, that's just the money. That's the money guy voice that I do. I don't have another one. Yeah. So obviously the people being, being given their deliverables, like KPIs get set. Product targets are given, sales are are being told.
You know, sales are always like defining the roadmap of just like we've been, we told everyone that we can do this and now you have to go figure it out. So there's a lot of layers of business in between kind of the person who's writing the feature. And I'm, I'm never usually mad at [00:11:00] them. It is just, uh. A lot of, I feel like basically my, my thing with ai, especially in the API scene, we could talk about AI in general.
That's huge. But like in the API scene, there was an API days conference, I went to, I don't remember what it was. I think it was 2020 in Paris and it was like before they started doing AI tracks. And it was just like everyone was there that year talking about ai. Obviously that's why they got AI tracks after that.
And it was just loads to loads of people being like. We are developing this tool, which means that you don't need to, you don't ever need to integrate with an API ever, again, you don't ever need to think about any of the data that's being handed around. You can just have a random API and, and you can generate a random front end for it based on vibes, and it would just be brilliant and absolutely fine.
And he got the whole way through his 45 minute odd talk going on about how you never need to write integration code ever again. And it would all just work perfectly. And, and one, [00:12:00] the first question was like, so how does any of it work? Is it literally, can you just point it at any API like you've been saying, or like, do you have to build certain conventions into your APIs?
Like. Well, you do need to like rewrite your API to follow these specific, very restrictive rules and guidance and everything else, right? And obviously this is what became the precursor for Mt p. They wanted to add a layer in between a perfectly good functioning API and whatever bullshit the slot machine required to function.
And so that it was frustrating for a long time that like my very first introduction to it in the API world was someone lying through their teeth and then crumbling under the very first follow up question they got. But since then, people just seem to have got better at hiding some of that and, and it's never got better at functioning.
It just seems to be they're better at selling you on the product and convincing you that you should try really hard. By which point you're kind of locked in. Haven't been delving into delving, uh, into the kind of products [00:13:00] as much lately to see if they've got any better. And I'm sure people are working hard on solving it.
And I imagine that, that, that may well be what you are trying to do, right? Like, make this stuff work good. Because from the early days, I kind of went and then I just cut. I'm gonna stop paying attention. Like how, how do you see AI helping? Nicely with integrations. Like what, what do you do to make it be useful beyond the demo in a talk that gets people signing up to your product and then wandering off after they've paid you for a few months and it hasn't worked, but you still had them paying for a few months?
Yeah, I'm less, um, I mean there are very few things I use AI for that are, are useful and practical. I generate some schemas. And I always, you know, I'll, I'll pass it a pricing page, URL or the content from a pricing page for a, a SaaS, and then I give it A-J-S-O-N schema and say, I want that pricing page in that schema.
And I do that programmatically. I do that fairly [00:14:00] common. I'll do it with rate limit pages. I just have standard schema for those things that I do because I don't, I don't want just my docs to be. Machine readable. I want my pricing rate limits. I want the whole package, you know? Yeah. The whole experience to be, so I do use it for some of that, but beyond that, like I don't use it to edit stuff.
I like writing, I like, and I, I like editing my shit even though I screw it up sometimes and mess because that's how I learn. So like I don't wanna off load that stuff. I guess, where I'm finally finding a market fit after, I mean, this is after a year of just going. I'm gonna go do something else 'cause I just don't see any sense in this.
Like, and then talking to enough people and then realizing they've been doing interesting things at, at interesting companies in interesting industries. And then they just have some clown boss that came to them and said, Hey, you gotta do this. You gotta do MCP. And so I'm trying to help them do, 'cause they've got some mandate to do a copilot or something.
Augments their tool so they can be like GitHub or Microsoft or something. [00:15:00] And my goal is to just make it as. Low impact. You can use your existing open APIs, how to maybe add vendor extensions, how to expand your, your spectral rule set a little bit. So how do you build on that existing work to meet this demand?
It's less what can you do with ai? That's super cool. I've got a few use cases and I think you have one or two, but I don't at all feel compelled to like find interesting use cases for AI, for anybody. There's plenty of clowns and people out there who are, who are interested in doing that, but I am interested in helping us all.
Keep, keep our jobs, maintain our businesses, not go bankrupt and, and yeah. Not totally mess up the world if possible. Yeah, absolutely. I've, I've been, I've been really enjoying kind of the, as much as I've kind of had this kind of, uh, uh, Luddite in the proper definition of it, uh, approach to ai, um, of just like.
I don't hate technology. I hate when it completely replaces labor and, and makes everyone's [00:16:00] lives worse, which is what the ludic were about. Right? Thank you for that, by the way. Thank you for that real, real definition. Exactly that that needs to be said more because people just toss that term around like you ate computers.
I'm like, I've defined my entire fucking life by computers. How dare you. Like I even run like a reforestation charity now that uses like a whole bunch of tech. We've literally got an API in the background that shows you where our trees are and like it powers the entire company. I don't hate tech. I hate ars assholes doing ars asshole shit for money with tech.
Amen. I do occasionally find like a wonderful use of AI that actually brings me joy. So we were speaking on, I think it was the last episode with Tom from Wire Mock and they have a, a, a mocking system, which does a whole bunch of stuff, right? Like mocking does a million things. But they were talking about how they actually kind of edge into testing and edge into fudge fuzz testing.
And the, the cloud offering can like use AI to create useless requests that you can see how your API handles. I was like, that's fucking genius. That's like create your request that tries to do this and like make a bunch of mistakes and like [00:17:00] obviously that last part is redundant. It was gonna do that anyway.
That's what it does. Um, and, and so to use AI slop to be slop, um, and, and test how your API handles slop is brilliant because the requests that we're gonna hit your API for years and years and years, were gonna be. Poorly constructed by someone that didn't read the docs or didn't know you had docs. Or you didn't have docs, right.
They were gonna be bad requests coming in, but now it's just used like this entire swath, this entire treasure trove of the entire internet of, of dumb mistakes to creatively cock up requests to your. API and you can see how your API responds to those. Like, that's obviously brilliant and that's not melting the planet.
So like, I do like it when people find good things. I think a lot of the problem has for me is just, it's obviously exactly the same people who were really excited about crypto and that didn't go anywhere and they're really excited about NFTs and that didn't go anywhere, and they got really excited about ai and that's [00:18:00] not really, you know, the bubble hasn't blown yet.
So they're all still really excited about it. But it, it, it is that. Seeing the exact same people, the exact same, like snake oil salesman, just keep pushing bollocks. So when someone can go, well, actually there is this very limited use case in which I think it can genuinely, really help. I'm like, brilliant, do it.
I actually quite liked, um. Optic. Um, so before Optic got bought out by Postman, they were working on No, at They got bought by, oh, it was Atlassian, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, ah, postman bought a similar learning tool, which was Oh, Aita, Aita. Aita. Thank you very much. Yeah, I always confuse those two, but yeah, postman similar.
Atlas Competitive. Yeah. And Optic had that Lynch, GPT. And, um, there was a little minute where I was like, this is actually pretty good. Like, I've written some rules that spectral couldn't handle and it was like out for any. Fields that have PII in the response or something like that. And it would, it would very inconsistently and, and non [00:19:00] determinative, but quite well occasionally spot some fields that I wouldn't have thought of, that I wouldn't have put into a big if field name equals array in spectral.
So there have been some things that I think are pretty cool. Have you got, have you found any other little bits like that that, that you think it's really helping with? Yeah, I mean, similar ones that are, that are verifiable. So if you can link it to, you know, some sort of determinism With a JSO schema, I have quite a few, a toolbox of use cases.
'cause I, um, I have a, a specification called APIs, JSON, which is, is, is billed as API discovery and that's what most people think of it is. But for me, it's, mm-hmm. Discovery of APIs using crawlers. So that kind of discovery rather than developers discovering APIs. But I, so I crawl GitHub and I crawl Bing and I crawl Google via partners for APIs.
And when I find docs and there's no open API present, I will auto generate an open API from that. But I validate it with the nice, the js ON [00:20:00] specification. And I also do that for pricing pages, rate limit pages. Because in my, I want the whole portal, the whole experience to be machine readable, so for discovery for other purposes.
But it doesn't tend to align with API providers or why people think things should be machine readable. So it hasn't ever moved forward as fast, but I find it useful for that 'cause I can validate it with a J schema coming out of the output and that helps me. And I, I use that for, I generate specal rules sometimes too from that landscape.
Mm-hmm. And then I validate 'em 'cause there's a J schema for spectral rules, which I'm sure you know because you've helped create. Right. And so like, you know, these things are, are validatable and you can make 'em deterministic. And they're low. Like I'm not using 'em in runtime. I'm using 'em in design time.
So the, the risk level is lower. So for, yeah, low risk things I can make deterministic. Hell yeah. I'm on board. Okay. So where's the AI involved in that? So you're crawling, you're crawling through search engines and then mm-hmm. What are you [00:21:00] doing? You find an API and you start like generating APIs, Jason, with ai.
So it's like. Is that, where does that AI get involved? I won't, so I won't generate the APIs json So here's the one that I just did with, it's a little inception level for Claude Gemini and chat GPT. Okay? Mm-hmm. So there's some, some of them have, uh, o open api, open AI has an open APIs for their api. I, that's, that was hard one to say.
Yeah. Claude, I couldn't find one. Gemini has a discovery doc. So I needed to converge on open API I three one across that. So I helped do that. For me, the APIs, JSOI use as scaffolding, so I don't need it to generate that. It's pretty, pretty basic stuff. It's, but the individual properties, docs being that first one open API.
So if there's not an open API or if there's often a swagger, how do I get to the open API three one. If there's a Ramel, if there's a, a Postman collection, if there's a Bruno [00:22:00] collection and insomnia, like how do I get to open API three, one, that helps me. But then with Claude, GE, and Gemini and, and OpenAI, I want their pricing and rate limits, their headers and all of that.
And I want that all machine readable because I wanna automate. The usage and the AB testing across these. So you should be able to route to Gemini or Claude for different purposes. Yeah. And I wanna know the cost. What's this gonna cost? Is it a cost based decision? Is it quality base, that kind of thing.
And so having the pricing, the rate limits, and um, so they all three have usage based pricing. The count you're in. Excuse me. User based pricing, the account, user account, you sign up, you pay monthly. They have usage on the API. Yeah, traditional cloud-based usage. And then they have model based pricing, and then they have a fourth, which is called tier.
So how much money I load up in my credit card on cloud [00:23:00] or depends on determines. How my, my rate limits and my costs are. So there's this spread of costs that I wanna automate. And so using each of those services to do the little incremental pieces of automation, not the overall scaffolding. That's my vision.
That's what I need. I'm finding value in that, but it's, it's me doing the homework all along the way. Yeah. Okay. Fun. That's pretty nice. I've not, yeah, I've not played around with too many of the specific providers. I mean like I think most of my AI interaction is like VS. Code has just wedged a bunch of it in there and every now and then it, it makes recommendations at me that are just absolutely horrific.
And then I say, no, go away. Exactly. It spends a lot of time trying to help me write. Articles and I'm like, no, my, this, I can, I can make money by typing words don't type words for me. I will type better words than you anyway. Mm-hmm. But then sometimes I feel like it's just vomiting entire paragraphs stuff I wrote.[00:24:00]
'cause I feel like the open API. Writing about open API is a pretty niche section of the world, and like it will, it will recommend a paragraph. I'm like, that's my fucking paragraph, man. I wrote that. I'm sorry. Just the, the probabilistic realm. Dude, you've written a significant portion of the open API content, so thus it is filled, right?
Yeah, it started like if you try and write about open API with a copilot on, it will, it will use British English and swear a lot anyway. That's probably enough about ai. I mean, I, I think we talked about it in general, but like what, specifically? What, what is your, uh, startup up to? What, what are you. What's your plan?
Or is it early days? You don't really know. I mean, literally it's early days and so literally it's, it's finding that that approach that I can, can come at it without holding my nose or losing my soul and, and constantly build a startup and then go out and be the face of it. So that's been the last five, six months.
'cause I came into it with the same feeling as [00:25:00] you. And, and so I think I've, I've got that, but it's, um. You know, and it kind of speaks to specifically the MCP and the specs, I think is what more, more yours and mine's wheelhouse is. It's not, it's less about ai and for me it's about the power grab of the digital, of the digital bits, which.
Has been going on for a long time. I mean, you know, postman, you know, open API stole swagger, you know, like that. Politics and business across those bits, Ramel, API Blueprint, everyone was fighting over those. The spec bits we landed on open API it's in the foundation, but you and I know they're still Smart Bear and, and MuleSoft kind of fingerprints on that struggle for the bits, but it's in the foundation.
Yeah. Since then, you know, we've had type spec from Microsoft. Smithy less so from AWS, um, but Open API is the solid player. I mean, the big players out there have open API Specs and GitHub, plaid, Twilio, [00:26:00] Stripe, they all have open api. So that's the defacto standard. But then GraphQL came along, you know, there was that power grab around GraphQL, and this is the thing, and it's kind of shrunk back.
People realize, you know, there's still a market, there's still use, but it's not the, the silver bullet. It was, it was gonna replace rest. We had a little with event driven along the side, but now we have MCP, which is just, you know, J-S-O-N-R-P-C and another kind of power grab at these digital bits. And so that's, that's what I'm trying to focus on, is like.
I'm ta I'm trying to sell to customers who still have soap and still have whis, you know, and trying to not get the, to get them to not step away from their open API and their spectral governance that they've invested in for like, the last seven, eight years and chase this new shiny thing and how, right.
But, but how can they deliver it without, without, uh, too much cost and too much shift. So it's in that wider. [00:27:00] Landscape, that 25 year view of the things that I'm trying to orient what's going on with CP and ai. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean the, yeah, there's definitely those companies that are like, yeah, still on soap and things that came before it, and they seven, seven or eight years thinking about switching to a new thing whilst they work through that and, and really spec it out like.
Big companies slow roadmaps. I, I think a lot of us forget that that is a thing that exists. Like the, the thing for me that was always really annoying about GraphQL was that people, people were like throwing away a rest API they built six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, because they thought they needed to go run off and do GraphQL to do a thing, which was perfectly possible and reasonable and common to do with the rest.
API be it sparse, failed sets or compound documents. Um. And so I always got really frustrated about like, if you are rest API, after a year or two. It's so bad you want to throw it out [00:28:00] completely. Redesigning everything in a brand new paradigm that you don't understand yet is not gonna make that better, right?
Like it's, it's gonna be worse than what you currently have. And so I spent a lot of time trying to just get people to pump the brakes a little bit and, and yeah, like there. Just how, how do you build, how do you design and plan an API that's gonna be useful and usable for more than a year? 'cause I feel like half the people WeWork's happening, A lot of people went from rest to GraphQL.
Running straight back to reco. And actually it was fine over there. I'm just gonna make this one tweak. Or just like adding a gz compression, a GIP compression header will probably help. Or switching the GS passer means that we don't need to completely switch to some other GRPC. There were these like small improvements that could be made, and I want people, I spent a lot of time focusing on helping people improve where they're at, but I was always trying to help them improve the rest so they didn't have to run off to something else or rewrite to another rest.
But I, I do like the idea of like. [00:29:00] You are there saying, Hey, you're on soap right now. Rest is gonna be a good step forward for you. If you do it like this, please don't run off and just AI generate some slop like you've spent eight years thinking about how to build this new rest API that will solve all your problems.
Go in, make API hot into a prompt. Isn't gonna, isn't gonna help. So yeah. That's a really funny use case. You talk to different people to me. Yeah. It's the, I mean, think of MCP as just GraphQL. It's just for a different, you know, consumer client audience. And as I see it, it's one tool in, in a large toolbox.
Where rest is still the simplest, cheapest to do. Um, and it's gonna get to your widest audience so people can produce it or consume it. It's gonna, there's most tools to document and govern it. And then, yeah, there's, there's times you need events, but, uh, not everyone needs Kafka. You know, web hooks work real well.
Um, yeah. And yeah, there's sometimes you have a specific team who knows the schema. It's a massive schema and, and their front end developers get [00:30:00] outta their way, give 'em a GraphQL endpoint. And I'm, I'm guessing there's situations where we want MCP, but the problem is, is every wave of these coming along, going, you've gotta rer your whole base and come over to our platform and it's the latest, you know, snake oil from whatever venture capital and people jump and then they don't realize that in, in three or four years, there's gonna be an exit.
And the in notification sets in and, and you know, that's the way it is. Yeah, that is always the way. I think there's also like something we've both been pretty annoyed about is that in all of these like emerging markets, there's an immediate money grab of like cool hot startups with a brilliantly beautiful marketing page and a snazzy title that are just there to be like, we've solved every problem that you never know existed.
And they come out and they make a bunch of really cool stuff and then they might settle down. By version three or four or five, they're like making some genuinely really useful stuff. And I've seen so many of these companies, like Optic, they, they were [00:31:00] on like version nine, uh, within a, within two years or something.
They, they rewrote their stuff so many times. I have no idea how Aidan had time for this, but like they were making some really useful stuff. Uh, stoplight, like when I joined, they're on version four of the SaaS platform at least. And they'd rewritten Prism three or four times from Golan to. Type Js, uh, type script.
And it was getting pretty useful. And like spectral was the third version they'd written. And it was a ripoff of two versions of specky before that. Like you kind of get this like quick burst of just like, we're really excited about stuff. How are we gonna make loads of things? Loads of things, loads of things, and it takes a little while to settle down.
It becomes genuinely useful. And then you've got this golden little time where things are genuinely really useful. And then the massive corporates just swing by and, and snatch everything up. I was writing about API E closing down, apparently them putting a little banner on apiary. If anyone's not familiar listening, uh, on the podcast.
'cause there are other people here, not just me and you. I keep forgetting this. Um, API E kind of built that [00:32:00] a PA blueprint format. It was one of the three main rivals. Bef uh, you know, the open API Ramel A P Blueprint. They made a P vPrint pretty useful. Loved it. It was my first introduction to API descriptions and I was a big fan.
They made that whole thing, and then that was like 10 years ago. I was working with that. 2016. They recently put a banner up. It was apparently a bug. Wasn't intentional. It was a bug that said like, Hey, we're closing this down in September. Y'all better shove off. Apparently that was a bug, but it's like no one, no, no one's cat got on the keyboard and typed out that prompt, like they're clearly about to get rid of it, even if it wasn't meant to go live at that point.
Yeah. So yeah, like obviously being bought out by Oracle, they've been closing down the. Paid pricing. They've been suggesting people move over to Oracle Cloud. They've been completely failing to write a new feature for almost a decade like these. An API I Apiary was amazing. Um, an API blueprint was amazing and the tool suite was amazing.
Dread was amazing. All these things. And, and [00:33:00] that seems to just be on repeat throughout the API, especially open API world, which is call new startup. They go for a while, they get a few rounds of funding, they get really big, they get really useful, and then some giant boring corporate buys them. Merges them into a really unflattering platform where you can barely find that functionality and you've gotta pay five squillion dollars.
To get anywhere near anything above the free plan that doesn't do anything before you can even start trying to find the functionality that used to be reasonably priced. Like, how do you feel about that? Why does that keep happening in APIs? Is that just capitalism and we're a bunch of mo little socialists on the internet or what's going on there?
Yeah, I mean, it's just capitalism with, with venture capital tacked on and that velocity and, and not pumping the brakes, not slowing things down. I don't think we're gonna stop it. We're gonna change it. I mean, you know how taking on capitalism, we're not gonna win, bro. Like, we're not, there's no way. [00:34:00] But there's ways we can slow that down, change it, shift course, and, and do things and make, and still make the world a better place.
And so a PA was a big deal in the moment. Like swagger wasn't a spec to begin with. It was a config file for the docs and the code gen. Which both suck like that. They were groundbreaking in the moment and then Apiary came along and was like, oh wait. Hey, how about if we create a good spec and not just a config schema and do this intentionally and create a set of tooling that's gonna help us be designed first.
And it, so it was a big deal and, and it still resonates in the space that the concept of design first came from that, that realm. Yeah. And people like you and I championed that. So that's just the cycles. I mean, it's like, you know, whatever the tool is. SmartBear, I mean, SmartBear takes advantage of acquiring and kind of building a patchwork quilt that they've, things they've acquired.
Then they don't do anything else with 'em when they go forward. MuleSoft was just [00:35:00] rocketing towards an acquisition, postman's on its own. You know, all of these have their own kind of trajectories, but yeah, like. Grabbing up anything nice in the space and owning it. That's how you buy relevancy. I mean, like SmartBear, if you can't innovate, you acquire relevancy, you acquire innovation.
Yeah. So that's what you do. But we can slow 'em down with open source. But open source isn't a, a save all, you know, specky to spectral to. Wherever we're at today, like open source isn't gonna save our soul, but it's one way we can give back to the community along the way. And I, I like spending venture capital money on, on open source.
I think that's a worthy cause trees spending it on trees if you can. Yeah. So it's the way things are. We have to live in it. I think we have to get creative about how we still not lose ourselves. I mean, it makes it hard to get excited about. New players in the space sometimes because I, I see new things come out [00:36:00] and I'll, I'll share them around like, um, you know, speakeasy do an incredibly good SEK generation where you don't have to install Java and, and scale it like recreating most of the kind of open source.
Foundational layers of open API stuff that have just been completely unmaintained for so long, like swagger bars are being replaced. Brilliant. They, they've done loads of open source stuff and they're starting to roll out more and more products on top of that. Yeah. Bump just being like, here's one single CLI command you can run and your, your docs are all hosted, like these tooling providers are the underdog and they're scrappy and some of them are more early days than others, but like they're going and they're doing really useful stuff.
And then, you know, I'm writing like, Hey, these things are great. You should go use these things. And then the more that you say, Hey, these are great, you should go use these things, the more the chance of them just getting acquired by an asshole company that fires everyone and like deletes the code increases and it, it feels like I'm just like the gentrification of [00:37:00] the API tooling space of just like it gets good for a little bit and then it's just, it's completely unaffordable and terrible.
So it's, it's hard to, to be in that cycle, I guess is, is all I'm thinking. It's not like being the main example, like, you know, pouring that, that was, that was, I was an insider. I, I was working there for a long time. Product manager, project manager. Really, really like making those tools what they were. And then they've just been like, some of it was copied and pasted into, into a swagger, uh, a swagger hub.
And then a lot of it's just being kind of ditched, right? And so it's hard whether you are working on it, advocating for it. Being just the person at your company that says, Hey, this thing's cool, we should use that. And then you are the person that's responsible for making this entire company reliant on something that's vanished six months later.
It's really hard. I don't know how to feel about any of that. It just makes me angry. Yeah. Well you, me, you mentioned dread earlier, like I've been tempted to re, re revive dread like two or three times over since Oh, yeah. It's gone away. [00:38:00] Oh yeah. Hell yeah. And there's other tools that are similar to that.
So, I mean, it kind of feels like, you know, like the business you're in is like. How do you plant trees on land? That there's all this history. I mean, there's so much history in the UK as far as who owns this land and who has access to this land and who can, let me tell you a story after we've recorded, who owns the resources on that land?
Who doesn't? Yeah. You know, I know there's, there's just a lot of politics, business and politics, and it's the same in this virtual world we're building. So it's like, what I wanna try to figure out, and this is what I'm, I'm trying to do with my startup now. Be honest about with inve investors and go, look, we're building open source and we're gonna be building stuff that's gonna stick around and we're gonna build community.
There's a, a trajectory that's going into Linux, CN CF Apache. It works with those existing tools. We know the standards that are out here, so we're paying attention to all the fences and landmarks and paths and trails and communities that you would be paying attention to with trees. How do we get [00:39:00] people giving a shit about this?
But leave a mark. But acknowledge that in 10 years when that new, and I don't know, you know, e battery factory goes in and land priorities change. You know, we're gonna need to ship, you know, so it's like, yeah, there's no constant, I guess we just gotta do the best we can with what we have. Yeah, that makes sense.
Good things can't last forever, but they can be handy for a while. Cool. I mean, on that note, we are probably about out of time, but I feel like I could talk to you about a million things forever. Where, where can people find more of you, and what is the name of this? That you're working on right now? I mean, as always, API evangelists will always be Kin Lane and be my, I'll never sell it to anybody.
I'll, I'll bury it before it, you know, and I still write there and I still rant there, but I don't care about social media or traffic or anything, you know, it's just my, it's, it's kinda like your, your brand too. It just keep it. But I'm building, I'm building nco, which is Greek. It means Navy. We don't have a product yet.
We just set up the company. It's a European [00:40:00] company. We set it up in France. Um, nice. And we're, you know, we'll be launching it here, coming up. Um, this, uh, this, this early winter, uh, late fall, but we don't have a site. You can find us on LinkedIn, but API Evangelists is where, where you can see what's going on right now.
That's brilliant. I'll shove some links in the show notes for everyone listening and, and, uh, yeah, they can follow along. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It's nuts that we've had however many episodes we've had. I, it'd be too boring to count and I've definitely lost track, but we've been going for years we've never had you on.
That's nuts. So thank you for helping me rectify that. Any time, anytime. And, uh, keep up the good work you're doing, my friend. It's, uh, important stuff. Thank you very much. Cheer folks. Not folks. The, not the API stuff. The API stuff is important. The true stuff. None of this matters. The true stuff is important.

Yeah, this is very true. Thank you very much.