In this episode of the MonkCast, RedMonk senior analyst Kate Holterhoff sits down with Kin Lane, API Evangelist and Co-Founder & Chief Community Officer (CCO) for Naftiko, to untangle one of the most pressing questions in developer tooling today: what happens to APIs and SDKs when AI enters the picture? Kin traces the SDK from its origins in the REST API era of 2008, through the recurring (and always premature) declarations of its death, to its current identity crisis in an age of AI co-pilots, MCP servers, and agentic IDEs. The conversation explores how OpenAPI specs are being used to shrink context windows and why AI might generate bespoke, single-purpose SDKs on the fly rather than shipping monolithic language-specific kits.
Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/sdks-in-the-ai-era-with-kin-lane/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to APIs and SDKs
06:36 The Evolution of SDKs in the AI Era
10:08 Future of SDK Generation and Automation
17:20 Business Alignment and SDK Development
20:09 The Role of IDEs and MCPs in SDKs
26:07 SDKs for AI Agents vs. Human Developers
29:15 The Power of Language in Technology
30:40 Navigating Determinism and Non-Determinism in AI
35:29 The Role of Abstraction Layers in Development
39:00 API Governance: Bridging Gaps in Development
46:22 Designing APIs for AI Misuse
50:52 The Evolving Identity of Developers
58:07 Where to Follow Kin Lane's Insights