Nafitko Capabilities

For this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast we sat down with Budhaditya Bhattacharya from Tyk and Supreet Nagi from Northwestern Mutual to talk API governance. Supreet shares his practitioner perspective on achieving zero touch governance, where compliance is baked into the development lifecycle rather than being a gate or checkpoint. Budha discusses governance as consistency, reliability, and predictability for APIs, and the importance of reframing governance from something that creates friction to something available by design. We explore the cultural shift needed to get stakeholders aligned, the value of maturity models for tracking progress, and the importance of iterative value delivery over big-bang governance projects. Supreet also discusses his new book From Chaos to Connectivity, the API Practitioner's Handbook.

For this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast we had a conversation with Dániel Kovács from Speakeasy about their newly released agent skills and what they signal for SDKs and developer experience. Daniel discusses how coding agents like Claude and Codex are changing workflows, and how deterministic SDK generation can prevent costly contract mismatches between clients and APIs. Daniel explains agent skills as on-demand context snippets and how Speakeasy uses them for common tasks like getting started with their CLI and improving OpenAPI specs for better SDK outcomes. A key focus is balancing AI-driven, non-deterministic changes with deterministic processes using OpenAPI overlays to refine generated specs, improve method naming, and organize endpoints.

In today's Naftiko Capabilities podcast we sat down with freelance journalist and developer experience expert Jennifer Riggins about the current state of developer experience amid rapid AI adoption. We discussed how AI can improve individual productivity and broaden participation in building technology, while raising concerns about security, missing guardrails, and best practices. We explored platform engineering as a conduit for AI success, the persistence of organizational silos, and the reality that enterprise “swarms of agents” aren’t happening yet due to legacy constraints and unresolved integration and data challenges. This episode also touches on job precarity, unemployment, at-will employment impacts, and implications for junior developers.

As part of recent work on spec-driven development I sat down for conversation with Chris Hood about experience-based API design, arguing that APIs should be expressed in human, business-oriented language rather than CRUD-centric engineering terms to improve contextual understanding. we discuseds why traditional REST approaches may be insufficient for AI and agent-based systems, concerns about introducing new protocols like MCP, and the “agentic API” paradigm for agent-to-agent communication with built-in security and web-embedded protocols. We also explore how AI could help by making APIs more intelligent and contextual, and by incorporating feedback loops where agents and humans report missing skills.

In this episode, I sit down with Clemens Vasters, Principal Architect for Messaging and Real-Time Intelligence Services at Microsoft, to talk about JSON Structure — a new spec designed to take on the territory JSON Schema has dominated for years. Clemens shares the origin story behind JSON Structure, why JSON Schema and Avro both fell short for Microsoft's real-time data pipeline needs, and how he built a cleaner, more focused data definition language that keeps the familiar shape developers already know while cutting out the complexity that breaks tooling.

This episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast features a full conversation with Patrick Kelly (SideKo, Port of Context) about context engineering for AI agents, MCP, and evolving API tooling. Patrick explains SideKo’s shift from generating developer-facing API products (docs, SDKs, mock servers from API specs, with customers like Prudential) toward Port of Context as agent consumption grows, including leveraging techniques like giving agents SDKs and dynamically exposing documentation. Kin shares his background across OpenAPI/Swagger tooling, SDK efforts (including Microsoft Kiota and dynamic SDK sizing), API management, and his Postman experience with collections and right-sizing context windows. He describesNaftiko’s work-in-progress API consumption gateway/proxy and a catalog of sandboxes for tools like Notion, GitHub, and Slack, organized into tagged capabilities to support safe experimentation for design partners (including banks) and to enable mocking and generating agent skills/cards. The conversation covers evaluating agent API usage more precisely via proxy/state control approaches, bridging enterprise governance and MCP adoption, and Port of Context’s runtime techniques (including translating many upstream MCP tools into a smaller set of agent-facing tools and exploring a virtual file system approach) while iterating safely through measurement. Patrick outlines spec linting and rules for OpenAPI-to-MCP generation, emphasizing improving descriptions so they work as tools, and handling messy real-world specs by letting agents explore context dynamically rather than stuffing everything into the prompt. Ken closes by noting the tactical vs. strategic perspectives, inviting listeners to connect for recorded conversations and sharing his contact details and recording times.

In this episode of Naftiko Capabilities we sit down down with Anna Daugherty of Arnica to delve into the important topic of application security governance. From pinpointing the sweet spot for identifying vulnerabilities to the role of governance in the development workflow, this episode covers it all. Learn how AppSec practices are evolving, the difference between AppSec and AI security, and how enterprises can make their security measures more effective and less intrusive.

In this episode of Naftiko Capabilities podcast we dive deep into the complex landscape of artificial intelligence. Through conversations with experts like Simon Wardley, Kevin Swiber, and Mike Amundsen, we explore the broad impacts of AI, from geopolitical considerations to practical technology applications. Learn about 'vibe coding,' large language models, and the balance between hype and realistic expectations in AI development. Ideal for tech enthusiasts, industry professionals, and anyone looking to stay informed about AI's evolving role in society.

In this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast, I sit down with Kevin Swiber to tackle one of the hottest debates in AI integration: are agent skills going to kill MCP? Spoiler — it's more nuanced than that. Kevin breaks down the difference between MCP tools (the what) and agent skills (the how), explains why most enterprise teams are still using AI as a glorified Stack Overflow, and makes the case that skills are more accessible to non-developers than MCP servers will ever be. We also dig into the context window problem plaguing MCP hosts, why progressive disclosure matters, and when MCP is overkill for headless agents. If you're trying to cut through the noise and figure out what actually matters for AI-powered workflows, this one's for you.

What happens when the gateway patterns we built for REST don't fit the AI agent world? Christian Posta, CTO at Solo.io, joins me to talk about why MCP and agent-to-agent communication demanded a completely new proxy architecture, how identity and authorization get complicated when non-deterministic agents start calling the shots, and the security risks lurking in runtime MCP server changes. Plus, we dig into Solo.io's open source strategy with Agent Gateway and what enterprises actually need to get MCP into production.

What happens after you build something that changes an industry? Fran Méndez created AsyncAPI—a specification now valued at $34 million—but he doesn't have $34 million. In this raw conversation, Fran opens up about walking away from the project he built over 10 years, the brutal economics of open source, and why he's now building Commune, a social network for newsletters. We talk about burnout, the "warehouse" of tech capitalism that slowly suffocates you, and why email might be one of the last spaces where people still have real control. If you've ever poured yourself into something bigger than you, felt the weight of expectations, or wondered what comes after you stop being "the guy" for something—this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast is for you.

In this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast, we sit down with Anil Dash—blogger, creator, and former founder of Glitch—to explore the fascinating origin story and enduring relevance of Markdown. Dash offers a firsthand account of how John Gruber's simple plain-text formatting tool emerged from the early blogging era on Movable Type, was beta-tested by the late Aaron Schwartz, and eventually spread through GitHub and Stack Overflow to become what Dash calls "the control plane for AI." The conversation surfaces unexpected wisdom: Markdown's lack of rigid standardization, once a source of frustration for technically-minded developers, may actually be the secret to its success—keeping it accessible, hackable, and resistant to enterprise capture. Dash reflects on how the push for formal specs and big-company validation often makes tools harder to implement and easier to co-opt, while the messy, human-scale origins of standards like Markdown and early RSS allowed them to thrive organically. It's a thoughtful meditation on what really matters when building technology that lasts: not impressive credentials or enterprise adoption, but real people making real things.

Drowning in distributed system chaos? You're not alone. In this episode, we sit down with David Boyne, creator of Event Catalog, to explore how organizations can bring order to the madness of modern architectures. David shares how his open-source tool evolved from a simple event documentation project into a powerful way to map domains, visualize boundaries, and make sense of the services, schemas, and signals flowing through the enterprise. We dig into the synergy between event-driven architecture and domain-driven design, why business context matters as much as technical specs, and how documenting your architecture today could become the foundation for AI and agent-driven automation tomorrow. Whether you're a developer buried in undocumented microservices or a product owner trying to understand what you actually have, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on turning architectural chaos into clarity. Check out Event Catalog at eventcatalog.dev and tune in now.

This episode of Naftiko Capabilities is focused on exploring some of the more advanced, but also foundational aspects of using JSON Schema and OpenAPI with David Biesack, Chief API Officer at Apiture/CSI. David shares their approach to using JSON Schema, along with the OpenAPI specification to get their hands around API and schema complexity, and bundling the schema and APIs needed for specific business context, then generating the documentation and code they need to power the business application and integrations they need. David shares their approach to using YAML and JSON, the bundling and unbundling of schema using references, as well as how the extend and ensure schema are discoverable. Demonstrating a sort of mastery with JSON Schema and OpenAPI that works for delivering APIs, SDKs, MCP, A2A, and all the other acronyms you need to power our business.

This is the Naftiko Capabilities podcast for January 13th, 2026, where we share excerpts from our conversations with Sam Newman and Simon Wardley on artificial intelligence's impact on the enterprise. Sam's conversation dovetails with last week's episode about microservices, while Simon helps us break down the relationship between the business of AI and the business of cloud computing. Both conversations demonstrate that much of what we're encountering isn't new—we're simply experiencing old playbooks getting refreshed through large language models and generative AI hype.

Microservices continues to be one of the top signals we see when profiling and talking to enterprise organizations about APIs and integration. To better understand the current landscape, we checked in with two microservices experts, Mike Amundsen and Sam Newman, to explore the state of microservices in an age of AI integration. We asked both Mike and Sam about the state of microservices, then went deeper with Sam to explore the business capabilities side—examining how organizational structure, people, and the overall enterprise journey influence microservices adoption and whether teams succeed with their microservices investments.

This is the Naftiko Capabilities podcast for January 6th, 2026, where we sit down with Mike Amundsen and Christian Posta to ask, "What is a Capability?" Mike brings a rich understanding of the web, hypermedia, and semantics, while Christian dives into the technical details from the artificial intelligence perspective, MCP, and the gateway view of capabilities. This discussion is helping inform what we are building at Naftiko when it comes to capability-centered integrations and automation, kicking off a new podcast series focused on aligning engineering and business with capabilities thinking that helps us all get down to business when it comes to enterprise integrations.