Contents

• API-Readiness for AI: A Seven Point Checklist

• Technology Highlight: Event Catalog

• Interesting Content for the Week

• FeedBack & Share

• Upcoming Conferences

API-Readiness for AI: A Seven Point Checklist.

I was at apidays London last week (22–24 September). It was another great opportunity not only to present a talk, but also to see the latest offerings from API technology providers in action and hear from industry thought leaders.

In this issue, I want to focus on a recurring theme I noticed at the conference: preparing APIs for AI.

Several talks explored what it means to make APIs “AI-ready”—covering design, documentation, and operations. I counted at least seven presentations in this category:

1. 12 Things You Should Be Doing to Get Your APIs Ready for Agents — Emmanuel Paraskakis, CEO @ Level 250

2. Securing Your APIs for Agents & MCP — Martyn Davies, Dev Rel Leader @ Zuplo

3. Is Your APIM Strategy Sabotaging Your AI Ambition? — Budha Bhattacharya, Director of Product Ecosystems @ Tyk, and Sophie Laundon, Head of Product @ Tyk

4. What Makes APIs Agent-Ready (and What Breaks Them) — Shan Srinivasan, Chief Product Officer @ DigitalAPI

5. Architecting Enterprise Agent Tool Infrastructure with OpenAPI and Arazzo — Sean Blanchfield, CEO & Founder @ Jentic

6. Delivering APIs for AI: Getting it Right with OpenAPI, Arazzo, and Example Mapping — Frank Kilcommins, Principal API Technical Evangelist @ SmartBear

7. Is Your API Agentic-AI Ready? — Naresh Jain, Founder & CEO @ Specmatic

I attended the first five (the others clashed with talks I also wanted to see). Across them, I noticed seven recurring themes, which together form a concise checklist for preparing APIs for AI consumption.

Checklist: API-Readiness for AI

1. API design: Treat agents as another class of user. Design APIs with agent use cases in mind: provide operations that aggregate multiple steps into a single call, and flatten data structures to make them easier for agents to parse.

2. API discovery: Ensure APIs are discoverable to agents through a centralised catalogue.

3. API documentation: Use comprehensive API description files. Provide rich operation and field descriptions, good naming, examples, and accurate metadata. Fix API drift. Use OpenAPI overlays to tailor OpenAPI description files for different audiences.

4. Authentication for autonomous systems: Provide token-based authentication, granular scopes, and least-privilege access. Use short-lived tokens and headless OAuth flows designed for agents.

5. Traffic management: Consider adaptive rate limiting that dynamically adjusts throughput instead of fixed limits. Include rate-limit headers so agents can self-regulate. Use idempotency keys (especially in financial scenarios) to handle retries safely. An API gateway is a must.

6. Workflow definition: Use formats such as Arazzo to define workflows in a standard, machine-readable way.

7. Error recovery: Adopt standard error formats (e.g., RFC 7807 – Problem Details for HTTP APIs). Provide specific error codes, meaningful context, retry guidance, and remediation steps.

If there’s one word that sums this up, it’s standardisation. Organisations that invest in strong API standards—and enforce them through governance practices—will find it much easier to prepare their APIs for AI-driven consumption.

Action point: API platform teams should create their own internal “AI-readiness” checklist for evaluating APIs. The list above can serve as a starting point, but also look at others, such as Emmanuel’s checklist - https://tinyurl.com/AIAPIsRoadmap and API Context’s white paper on Enterprise API readiness for agentic AI. Some organisations are even considering giving APIs an “AI-ready” certification once they meet the criteria. At the conference, I spoke with the platform team of a large European financial services company exploring exactly this approach.

Technology Highlight: Event Catalog 

Event Catalog is a self-hosted, open-source documentation tool that provides a centralized portal for discovering and understanding your organization's events and APIs.

It offers a Markdown-powered, version-controlled platform supporting documentation for various resources, including domains, services, messages (events, commands, queries), channels, schemas, and owners. The tool also supports OpenAPI and AsyncAPI descriptions.

Interesting Content for the Week

Runtime AI Governance

MCP Authorization Patterns for Upstream API Calls: This Solo.io blog post discusses five patterns for approving, crossing, and auditing upstream API calls across from MCP servers across different trust domains.

Announcing the 2025 DORA Report: State of AI-Assisted Software Development: The DevOps Research and Assessment group (DORA), have released their 2025 report. It finds that “The greatest returns on AI investment come not from the tools themselves, but from a strategic focus on the underlying organizational system: the quality of the internal platform, the clarity of workflows, and the alignment of teams. Without this foundation, AI creates localized pockets of productivity that are often lost to downstream chaos.“

API to MCP: step-by-step guide for developers: Stainless’ C. J. Quines provides a practical guide on how to make an existing API ready for AI by integrating it with the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Erik Wilde discusses 6 patterns for exposing API workflows for agents through an MCP servers: Erik shares patterns agents can use to get programmatic access to APIs.

Guardians of the Agents: Formal verification of AI workflows: Erik Meijer discusses a pattern for mitigating security risks security risks posed by agentic applications, by getting them to generate formal proofs demonstrating the safety of planned actions before being authorized to execute them.

API Production Governance

Introducing Meta’s New REST API Framework: What Developers Need to Know. One of the reasons Meta is moving to the new REST API Framework is to have an API that is “Aligned with common industry standards for easier adoption.“ REST is clearly the most common API style in the industry, so aligning with this as the default is important to Meta. They mention that “By 2026, REST will become the default for all new APIs across Meta.“

Future-proofing API management in financial services: A roadmap for 2025 and beyond: Tyk’s Laura Heritage presents a roadmap for API management in financial services, discussing such topics as FDX-readiness, Open Finance and data sovereignty.

Quick local API docs with Scalar: Lorna Jane discusses automating the process of generating and viewing local API documentation, using a simple script to streamline this repetitive task saves a significant amount of time and effort.

Ship API changes without breaking SDKs—preview builds show you exactly what will happen: Stainless’ preview builds features give engineers instant visibility into how a change to an OpenAPI specification will affect the SDKs, directly within a pull request.

How LLMs Are Breaking the API Contract (And Why That Matters): Art Anthony discusses the conflict between the need for predictable, stable API contracts and the unpredictable, potentially insecure behaviour of Large Language Models (LLMs) that consume or generate code for them.

Review of 4 Modern Documentation Platforms: Andrew DiMola reviews and compares four modern documentation platforms: Fern, Mintlify, ReadMe, and Redocly. highlighting four major ideas organisations should concider when choosing a documentation platform.

The OpenAPI Registry: Bruno Pedro argues for the creation of an official, authoritative OpenAPI Registry to solve the pervasive problem of API discovery.

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