Building APIs for Developers and AI Agents
Stainless founder Alex Rattray joins a16z partner Jennifer Li to talk about the future of APIs, SDKs, and the rise of MCP (Model Context Protocol). Drawing on his experience at Stripe—where he helped redesign API docs and built code-generation systems—Alex explains why the SDK is the API for most developers, and why high-quality, idiomatic libraries are essential not just for humans, but now for AI agents as well.
They dive into:
The evolution of SDK generation and lessons from building at scale inside Stripe.
Why MCP reframes APIs as interfaces for large language models.
The challenges of…
The skinny
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