TL;DR

Kevin Swiber joins The Good Thing to talk MCP, API governance, AI agents, investor patterns, and why boring infrastructure is good infrastructure.

How APIs silently connect everything

Kevin Swiber has worked across nearly every corner of the API ecosystem: from designing gateways at Apigee and Postman to advising investors, startups, and enterprise architects. Now operating independently, they bring a rare 360° view of the API space.

He joined Stefan and Jens on the latest episode of The Good Thing to talk about Model Context Protocol (MCP), AI’s growing role in developer tooling, and why infrastructure is getting boring again—in a good way.

“You’re not the center of the customer’s world”

Swiber opened the conversation with a reflection on their shift from vendor-side to consulting.

When you are in that vendor space, it’s kind of easy to forget that you’re not the center of the customer’s world.

As they explained, startups often treat every deal as urgent, while enterprise buyers are juggling “15 different initiatives”, and your product might be a small part of just one.

You might get to a no decision on the deal because that person has changing priorities and you’re just a small part of their world.

AI is moving fast. Most companies aren’t.

Despite the buzz around AI and MCP, Swiber reminded listeners that many teams are just getting started.

Normal people who aren’t in tech… they don't have 15 claude code instances running and they aren't trying to automate their whole lives. They’re just trying to figure out, ‘Okay, I’m using ChatGPT. Now my boss wants to use ChatGPT. What does that look like?’

Even highly technical teams are still exploring tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf.

As a product company, there's always in the back of your mind: Am I going to be irrelevant in the next five months?

What investors are really asking

Swiber advises investors too, and says their AI-related questions aren’t rooted in fear, but in clarity:

They’re asking, should we be investing more money? Should we be advising our portfolio to start doing more with AI or MCP?

His framework for evaluating API companies is simple: “credible, relevant, differentiated.” That lens matters even more now that infrastructure is seen as utility grade. It's stable, interchangeable, and no longer a source of competitive edge.

Too Many Teams, Too Little Visibility

Swiber described the side effects of distributed ownership models in large orgs.

I work with tons of companies who say, ‘We went to autonomous teams… and now we have no visibility. We have seven address verification APIs, and we’re paying three different vendors on the backend.’

The result isn’t innovation but sprawl. And sprawl needs governance.

Let’s go back to the process. How do we actually launch software? How do we get the most out of the investments we’ve already made?

AI won’t kill APIs—it just creates more of them

Some believe LLMs will replace the need for structured APIs, but Swiber doesn’t buy it:

Every time we say we’re trying to get out of doing APIs, we end up just creating more APIs.

As LLM agent architectures evolve, teams often try to bypass traditional API design. But in practice, MCP servers still need to call out to external services. That means the need for APIs doesn’t go away, but moves to a different layer. They often centralize functions and serve multiple consumers, creating new APIs in the process.

For a deeper look at why structured API safeguards matter in the age of autonomous agents, read Cameron Sechrist’s take on harm limiting.

Hypermedia was early. MCP might bring it back.

Swiber is known for creating Siren, a hypermedia type for APIs. When the conversation turned to LLM-powered agents, Jens asked, “Isn’t this finally hypermedia’s moment?”

Swiber sees those patterns returning, even if no one calls them hypermedia anymore.

We probably won’t call it hypermedia anymore. But the patterns—we’re coming back around to them.

They pointed to MCP UI flows where tools return responses containing forms. This echoes classic hypermedia patterns, just not by name.

There’s this whole MCP UI track… where a tool response comes back that essentially has forms in it. So you know what to do next.

Cosmo's MCP Server is already exploring this idea. It runs entirely on the client side and lets LLMs interact with Cosmo through structured UI responses.

Zero-click futures, walled gardens, and LLM behavior

What happens when LLMs become the primary interface to the internet? Swiber likened the experience to the early web: stripped-down, text-based, and impersonal.

We’re losing the entire experience of the web that someone has crafted for us.

That simplicity has benefits, but also trade-offs.

What happens to ad revenue in a ChatGPT world? And for the folks who went too far, showing me five ads before I can read an article—you better believe I’d rather go to ChatGPT.

The shift puts pressure on publishers and platforms alike.

There's now a third party in the mix. And everyone's kind of beholden to that third party. What information are they going to share with me?

Infrastructure should be boring

Asked about trends in platform engineering, Swiber didn’t hesitate:

People want boring infrastructure. Because they don’t want to wake up at 2am and hear everything went down.

Jens echoed the sentiment from his own experience:

We tried fancy vendors. Then we moved to GCP Kubernetes. It’s more expensive—but we’ve had zero issues in two years.

Sometimes the best tools are the ones you don’t think about at all.

Everything gets exciting, then it gets boring again

Near the end of the episode, the conversation turned reflective. Stefan and Jens asked Swiber how their thinking has changed over time.

Like many seasoned engineers, they described their journey through the hype cycles.

First, you think you have it all figured out. Then someone says, ‘Why do you have a factory-factory-factory pattern?’ It’s too complex. Eventually, everything becomes simple again.

And as for GraphQL? It’s not going anywhere—but it’s also not everything.

GraphQL went from ‘this is all I’ll ever need’ to ‘here’s where it fits.’ Same with LLMs and MCP. It’s additive.

🎧 Want to hear the full story? This episode covers even more—including GraphQL fatigue, the value of analysts like Gartner, and what enterprise architects are actually buying today.

Listen now on YouTube.

Editor’s Note: All quotes in this article are attributed to Kevin Swiber from Episode 25 of The Good Thing podcast. Some quotes have been lightly edited or paraphrased for clarity and readability.

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Over 15 Years of APIs with Kevin Swiber