MCP Servers: Teaching AI to Use the Internet Like Humans

If your MCP server has dozens of tools, it’s probably built wrong. You need tools that are specific and clear for each use case—but you also can’t have too many. This creates an almost impossible tradeoff that most companies don’t know how to solve. That’s why we interviewed Alex Rattray, the founder and CEO of Stainless. Stainless builds APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Alex has spent years mastering how to make software talk to software, and he came on the show to share what he knows. We get into MCP and the future of the AI-native internet. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share. Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Start 00:01:14 - Introduction 00:02:54 - Why Alex likes running barefoot 00:05:09 - APIs and MCP, the connectors of the new internet 00:10:53 - Why MCP servers are hard to get right 00:20:07 - Design principles for reliable MCP servers 00:23:50 - Scaling MCP servers for large APIs 00:25:14 - Using MCP for business ops at Stainless 00:28:12 - Building a company brain with Claude Code 00:33:59 - Where MCP goes from here 00:41:10 - Alex’s take on the security model for MCP Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Alex Rattray: Alex Rattray (@RattrayAlex), Alex Rattray Stainless: https://www.stainless.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Shipper?

  The internet runs on computers talking to each other, but its entire architecture was built for a pre-AI world. Now we're trying to hook AI up to the internet with MCP, Model Context Protocol, which turns any website or web service into a set of tools that an AI can use natively to get work done. And the software companies that learn how to do MCP well are going to win over the next decade. That's why I brought Alex Rattray, the founder and CEO of Stainless, onto the show. Stainless's job is to help computers talk to each other. They make the API and SDKs for all the big companies that you know about, like OpenAI and Anthropic, and they're starting to build MCP servers, too. So Alex and I get into the nitty gritty of what the future of MCP looks like,

• 0:44Dan Shipper?

  how to design good MCPs, why MCPs are actually really hard to scale and possibly insecure. And we try to figure out together what a better model for allowing AIs to use the internet might look like. This is a great episode. Alex is a good friend of mine. Let's dive in.

• 1:14Dan Shipper?

  Alex, welcome to the show.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Thanks, Dan. It's really exciting to be here.

• 1:18Dan Shipper?

  It's good to have you. So for people who don't know, you are the founder and CEO of Stainless, which is the API company. You make APIs for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and just name your big company that you might use their API. Stainless is probably behind it. Before that, you worked at Stripe doing their API, surprise. And before that, most importantly, we were very good friends in college, and we've remained good friends. And we were both starting companies in college. I'm a tiny investor in Stainless, but it's been really, really fun to watch your journey and get to hang out together so much over the years. And I'm just very excited to bring you on to talk about AI and what you're doing at Stainless.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Thanks, Dan. Yeah, it's been really fun over the years. I mean, when we were in college, I was working on a startup. You were working on a startup. You had a conference room at a venture capitalist's office as your office, and you let me crash there with my co-founder and team. And we were just like on the other side of the conference table hacking away into the evening.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  And very fond memories of those days. And these days, it's not every evening, but on the weekends, whatever, same thing is still happening. And you don't see that every day. It's a really nice feeling. And it's been great to see everything happening with every on the way.

• 2:46Dan Shipper?

  Thank you. As I say, I started from the bottom, now we're here.

• 2:51Dan Shipper?

  And yeah, I mean, the thing that I always say when I run into people and they ask me about you, in order to embarrass you, I just talk about how you're the only person that I know of who has consistently run barefoot through the streets of Philadelphia. Because when we first met, you were not a fan of shoes and you were a fan of running. You want to talk about that?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't that I didn't like the concept of shoes. It's that I couldn't find a good pair. And at a certain point, you know, it's like I was running through Nikes and they would bust open every few months. I think what was actually going on is I had really wide feet and I was buying probably narrow shoes. But shoes would constantly get ruined. And on a college budget, it's just like, this is no good. And eventually I decided, okay, the longer you wear your shoes, the more worn out they get. But the longer you just wear your feet, the tougher they get. So.

• 3:53Dan Shipper?

  The longer you wear your feet.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Try it out. Try this at home. What could go wrong? I actually currently have a really annoying splinter in one of my feet. That was, and so don't actually try this at home, but.

• 4:10Dan Shipper?

  Are you still running barefoot?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  No, no, this is just from around the house.

• 4:16Dan Shipper?

  I see. Dangerous.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. But see, that's the thing. If I had been going around on the asphalt without socks on, then my feet would have been tougher and I'd have no splinter.

• 4:30Dan Shipper?

  So when you're not running barefoot, you're running, you're running stainless.

• 4:39Dan Shipper?

  So you're running stainless. And so how many people, you're, you know, you're, you're around 50, right?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Just about. Yeah.

• 4:46Dan Shipper?

  That's, that's pretty wild. And you started stainless in a pre-AI world. And now we're in an AI world. And I think you have some ideas for what the future of AI is going to be. And maybe how, how APIs fit into that, maybe how MCPs fit into that. Do you want to like paint a little bit of a picture for us about where we're going?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would love to. So to start, like, what's an API?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Not everybody's familiar with that. So it stands for Application Programming Interface. There will not be a quiz, right? Right, Dan? No quizzes?

• 5:22Dan Shipper?

  No, no quizzes.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Great. But basically, it's how one computer program talks to another computer program. It's how, it's how computers talk to computers, how apps talk to apps. And so APIs are the dendrites of the internet. Dendrites are where your neurons connect and actually exchange information with each other. So if you have like two neurons in your brain, but they're not talking to each other, you're actually not thinking, right? There is no thought happening in a brain without connections between neurons. And if you think about the internet, if all these servers in the cloud weren't talking to each other, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have internet, right? Like, there's, there's nothing going on.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  If, you know, programs, internet software is doing nothing without APIs, without connections to, to other programs. And so it's really fundamental to the nesh, to the mesh of pretty much all modern software. Everything that we think of when we think about technology at this point, APIs are kind of at the, the heart and center of that, just like. Dendrites are the center of the mesh of the of the brain and how we think. And Seamless' mission from day one was sort of to make it easier for computers to talk to computers.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  So, and, you know, it's the long-running trend of technology to have more automation, right? Automation is what we mean when we say, okay, we're going to, you know, we're going to apply technology to that, you know, we're generally going to be making things more efficient. And APIs are how most business-to-business interactions in some format or another become real, become automated. And what we see with the rise of AI is that there is a new, a new computer has entered the chat, right? There's a new, there's a new kind of system that can talk to other systems, or at least

• 7:23Speaker 01

  we would like it to be able to. You used to have either, you know, humans interacting with a computer through a user interface, a UI, or a computer acting with a computer through, through an API. And now we have LLMs interacting with computers, right? And what's that through? And I'm sure anyone familiar with, you know, with every and his regular listeners is going to be familiar with MCP, Model Context Protocol, which is a system for connecting LLMs to computers, broadly speaking. And it's an area that we're investing in at Seamless. It's really, I think, part of our core mission of, like I said, make it easy for computers to talk to computers.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  And we've invested a lot of time, you know, at Seamless, the core product that we first brought to market is software development kits, SDKs. And so these are ways of saying, okay, Stripe has this great REST API, you know, you can send JSON over HTTP and get back JSON over HTTP.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And if you want that to be really convenient, you're going to use the Stripe Python library, the Stripe Python SDK. So you can go, if you're a Python developer, you'll go pip install Stripe. And then in your application code, you'll write stripe dot customers dot create. And all of a sudden, you have a nice new customer object in sort of your Stripe database. And you're off to the races. Or stripe dot charges dot create in the old days to charge a credit card.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  And SDKs are what gives developers that easy way to interface with an API. What's the thing that gives LLMs an easy way to interface with an API? And you might say MCP. And in a sense, you'd be right. But what we're seeing so far as MCP is rolling out into the world and people are experimenting with it and trying it out.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Is that it's not working so great. Like there's, it's, it's difficult to deliver on what I see as the core vision of what's so exciting about MCP, which is just like a dashboard and a user interface. Lets you click around, see a bunch of stuff, fill out forms, click buttons, do things. Anything that you would do while you're interacting with the software, you'd do through the user interface generally. But LLMs interacting with through MCP, it tends to be much more restricted. You can only do a few little things. There's usually not a ton of tools that you're going to be exposing to the models.

• 10:04Dan Shipper?

  And just, just to stop you there. So I think what I'm hearing you say is what the, what MCP does is just like a website is built for humans to be used. MCP is sort of the equivalent, and you can think of it in certain ways, of exposing a set of tools for the model that it can, it can use to perform certain functions. Just like you might click a button on a website. The MCP gives to the model a bunch of things it can click on or use to get work done. So an example might be, you know, and a Gmail MCP has like a send mail tool or like a compose mail tool or a read inbox tool, that kind of thing. And instead of a human going on the Gmail website and doing it, it's the, it's the LLM is like, you know, essentially logging in

• 10:49Dan Shipper?

  and using it itself. And it's a, it's a native interface for language models. But you're saying that. That's not working that well. Can you tell me more about that?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So let's, let's start actually with, with kind of what I see is the big vision of MCP. And in some sense, the big vision of agentic AI in the first place. And I'll start with the most pedestrian example you can imagine. It's going to be funny, given some of our context.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Which is, let's say, you know, Dan walks into my store and buys a pair of stripy socks and maybe a few other things. And then the next day I hear back from Dan that there was something wrong, unfortunately. It happens, you know? And I turn to someone on my team and I say, hey, can we refund Dan for those stripy socks he bought yesterday? And send him a discount code for, for the next time he comes in with like a little thank you note.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Cause we like to take care of our customers.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  This is like the most normal thing to do in software is, is some little task like this. And what you're going to do, what the, you know, the member of my team would be doing would be opening up their internal admin and looking around for some things. They might go to the Stripe dashboard and try to look through the list of payments or the list of transactions or orders. And try to find one that has someone named Dan, which Dan, I don't know, there might be a bunch of Dan's. Try to look through the list of products in the order and see whether there was some stripy socks in there. That might be a few clicks required depending. Find the right one, then go to the screen where you can create a refund, create a refund, make sure it's the right amount. Then go and create that discount and then take that discount code and send it

• 12:29Speaker 01

  over to some other SaaS app where you log in to send some, to mail automatically, right? And of course, if you step away from the consumer version of this to a business to business context, of course, you might be going into Salesforce and sending a Slack message to an account administrator, you know, an account manager, so on and so forth. And in the normal course of, of work, it's just the most normal thing in the world to be doing, having one task involve going through five different apps each time, 15 different clicks and scrolls and loading, loading spinners. Just to do sort of like one simple thing. And the promise of Agentic AI is to be able to take that same prompt I just said

• 13:12Speaker 01

  and type it into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever and say, hey, Chatty, buddy, can you help refund my friend Dan? Da, da, da, da, da. And just have the AI go off and do that. And basically go through these five different apps and the 15 different screens and the various different button presses to complete the task and then come back and say, great, it's done. That, in order to do that, now that's, there's only so many tool calls you have to make as an AI model to perform that exact linear chain of events. It's somewhat tractable.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  But if you think about this in the general case, you want the LLM to be able to do, you want your Agentic AI to be able to do anything that that human operator would have done. And you would want them to be able to do it without having to wait for a bunch of JavaScript to load on a website or anything like that. And that means you need not only the Stripe Create Refund Tool and the Stripe List Transactions Tool and the Stripe List Products and Look Up Customer and Create Discount Tool. You need not only those tools, but you need everything that you can do in the Stripe Dashboard, which is basically everything that you can do in the Stripe API.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And that's actually a lot. Like, there are hundreds of different endpoints that you have access to in the Stripe API. The Stripe Dashboard is actually massive. It's a huge application. And if you were to take that list of tools today and go to an LLM and say, hey, here's our MCP definition for all of this. Here's a Create Refund Tool. Here's a Create Transactions Tool, so on and so forth. And you tell it all about those tools. Here's the description. Here's all the different request properties that you can send. Here's the response properties you can get back. Here's all the documentation for each of those things. Everyone listening to this should already know. You've just burned through your entire context budget.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  That's, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands of tokens just there. And pretty much translating the Stripe Open API spec directly over to MCP Tools. And today's models not only can't handle that amount of context, it's a poor use of context because you have a lot else going on. But it's also confusing to the model. It's just, it's just too much to hold in your brain at one time. And that's just the straight part of it, right? Because what you're really trying to do is enable your operators to do anything they would normally do. And again, that spans many, many different SaaS tools, right? In the course of one interaction, it might be five. In the next interaction, it might be a different five.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  And so if you think about every single SaaS tool that your business uses on a daily basis to get your work done, ideally, you would want every single one of those tools to be exposed to your operators and their, and their AI chat with every single tool available in there, with every single nook and cranny and corner case available so that you can do anything through AI. That's, that's the vision. Now, there's a lot of problems with that. The biggest one that I mentioned is sort of this context window limit. But you also have all sorts of security and permissions problems because you don't want the AI to color outside the lines and say, okay, in addition to refunding Dan Socks, I also refunded every customer for all transactions ever, you know?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  And then I sent, you know, a bunch of money to my own AI bank account, ha, ha, ha. And so there's more to the challenge, but that's the vision I see.

• 17:00Dan Shipper?

  But I think, you know, the place we started there was, you said it's not working. But I don't think that that's the reason why it's not working today, right? Or is that, is that the reason why it's not working today?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  So what people do with MCP today is sometimes they'll try to expose all parts of their API. The way, the way people build MCP tools is, is generally speaking, they have an underlying API, usually a REST API, and they wrap different parts of that, different endpoints, different operations. In MCP tools and you can kind of do that in a one to one mapping, or you can kind of handcraft things for the MCP. And today, in order to succeed, people are finding that you really have to kind of handcraft it to the MCP, to the LMs. You have to say, okay, I'm making one specialized tool to look up a customer and refund their transaction based on a description.

• 17:57Dan Shipper?

  So there's all these like decisions that you have to make where you need to have like the ergonomics of the model and how the model thinks in mind in order to make sure the model does the right thing more often than not.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard.

• 18:10Dan Shipper?

  It's hard.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I use this SDK analogy sometimes. So it took a long time for humanity to get to the point where we could make a really good Python SDK for a Python developer wrapping it in API. And I think we've, we've, we've cracked that nut. Stainless offers really great Python libraries, but you know, we're building on the shoulders of giants here. A lot of people have, have done this over time.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  We haven't figured out how to expose an API ergonomically to an LM in the same way that we've figured out how to expose it ergonomically to a Python developer. And that's a kind of like a new research problem in a sense. And it's harder because I can go learn how to be a Python developer if I want. I can't really learn how to go think or see like an LM.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  But, uh, you know, sure would be powerful if I could. And, and, and that makes, that makes it tricky. We do have at stainless, I think some, some things that we're cooking up to, to address some of these problems, including not, you know, including the ones that you, you also mentioned, like LM's have a really hard time with a repeated sustained chain of, of actions. And, you know, even like if you get an API response back around, hey, like list all the transactions, there's so much data and you might have to go through the next page and the next page and the next page to go through all the transactions to find the one that has Dan with the stripy socks. And that's again, a ton of context with one or two small needles in the haystack.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  And LM's are pretty good at that, but they're not perfect. And with two, with too much hay, you know, we, we all kind of end up throwing up our hands and that's true for LM's too. So yeah, so there's a lot of challenges today.

• 19:58Dan Shipper?

  And so when you look at, I mean, you're building MCP servers for people. But when you build them and just generally when you see people doing it well today, like, what are the principles or how do you think about making an MCP server that, one, people use, which is actually a big one, and then, two, when it is used, actually does the right job?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  There have been relatively few times that I've seen it done well. I have seen it done well. We're kicking something up that I'm really excited about. But with today's technology, you really have to do a good job of product management. I mean, you have to go out into the market and talk to your customers and see what their actual needs are and look over their shoulders as they, you know, use and operate, you know, your software and think about what could we unlock through AI, where people would be doing things that they can't really do with our software today, because it just got so much easier. And then you have to do kind of a lot of engineering work usually to wrap it up in a bow that works for the models.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And you have to, you know, you have to set up a really good system for evals. And if you're doing MCP, you have to think about the different clients that people might be using. Are they using Cursor? Are they using Claude Code? Are they using something else? And the different models underlying all of that. So you end up with this pretty crazy matrix of things that you might want to optimize for and ways that you might want to evaluate and make sure that what you're offering is working well. And it's also kind of a black box to get that feedback back to your servers so that you can find out, hey, we gave a tool call response here. We gave an answer of some kind. Was it actually any good? Did the user like it? Was the L M able to use it?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And that's a problem that I think I haven't seen a lot of people solve yet as well. And so thinking about that as a first-class thing, maybe you have like a send feedback tool. That's something that we've been thinking about doing. Just so if the user like says out loud, you know, in the chat, oh, man, that was useless garbage. Like, okay, now at least the MCP server is going to find out about that.

• 22:15Dan Shipper?

  But is there anything specific you've learned about like how to do it well, other than like, obviously, you've got to talk to your customers, think about your use cases, but like more concrete, more applicable stuff about how to design a good MCP server?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  You want to keep the number of tools relatively small, relatively low. You want to have the tool name and the description be really precise and specific.

• 22:40Dan Shipper?

  Aren't those two things at odds?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yes. Good writing is hard. Yeah, I mean, that's what like, you know, you can make a great tool of lookup person by name and product description and then refund them. You can make a great tool that does that. And you also want a small number of properties in the input schema. You want a small number of parameters and you want them concisely described, but sufficiently described. This is also hard. And you want the response data to come back with a very small amount of data, only exactly what the model will need. That's also very hard because you may not know a priori which things the model is really looking for.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, we have a technique that we use in our MCP servers today where we give the model a JQ filter, which is a way of filtering out JSON. And that can work pretty well, but that's kind of a special trick.

• 23:40Dan Shipper?

  Doesn't this mean that like MCP just needs another level of like a search tool function, search tools, like find a list of relevant tools given my task?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  The tool browsing problem is definitely one very serious one. And that is one approach. And so we actually do this at Stainless today, where you can get an MCP server for your API that just has, like I was saying earlier, the very simple thing of every endpoint is exposed as a tool. And if you have a small API, that works great.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And you can also filter it out. So you expose an MCP server with only a small subset of your endpoints. That works great. You can also use kind of what we call dynamic mode, where there is three tools, no matter how big your API is. One is, you know, list endpoints. The other is get endpoint and learn about it. And then the last one is execute endpoint. And so that enables this context thing to scale really well. But it means there's three turns of the model just to do one thing. And so that that gets slower. It's more expensive in another sense. And there's some lossiness that it doesn't perform. It performs pretty well usually,

• 24:54Speaker 01

  but not not quite as well because

• 24:58Speaker 01

  the the tools aren't loaded up in quite the same way.

• 25:03Dan Shipper?

  Are you using MCP servers yourself?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I use I use MCP

• 25:09Speaker 01

  to actually funnily enough, not so much on the coding side, but I use it on the business side. So I'll use like the Notion, HubSpot, Gong, MCP servers to kind of say, hey, like, and actually MCP server for for our database, a read only, a read only copy of our database and say, hey, what are the interesting customers that signed up for stainless last week? And it'll go off and make a great query of our Postgres database and then it can cross reference those things in HubSpot and then look up our notes in Notion. Maybe even look at transcripts and gone and tell me all about it.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  It's it's incredible.

• 25:49Dan Shipper?

  Imagine going from idea to live website in just a minute with no code. At every we run six products in house with a team of just 15. So we're making landing pages and marketing sites all the time. And the tool we trust to do that at a high level is Framer. Framer is the design for a snow code website builder that lets you ship a production ready website in minutes. Type something like modern SaaS landing page for productivity app and watch it just generate a site with a responsive layout, a clean look and feel, and even pre filled copy. After that, Framer makes it easy to refine, style and publish your website. It's also really powerful. At every we care a lot about all the little details that go into the design of landing pages. And Framer makes it easy to do this.

• 26:31Dan Shipper?

  You can make buttery smooth effects and micro interactions with really simple sliders. It makes the website feel alive, like you care about all the little details. And once you turn your ideas into production ready effects really quickly. Another great thing about Framer is that it lets you localize your website easily. Click one button and translate your website from end to end into any language. Framer can handle all the heavy lifting while you focus on design. And when you're ready to launch, you can just hit publish and your site will be live instantly. Behind the scenes, Framer handles everything from posting to loading times to SEO optimization for you. So if you're ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer, launch your site for free at framer.com and use the code DAN. That's DAN, D A N, to get your first month of pro on the house.

• 27:16Dan Shipper?

  Rules and restrictions may apply. And now, back to the episode. And so that's one of your, that's one of your big use cases. Like, are you doing that like every week? Or how, like, how are you? I'm now I'm interested, not even from an MCP perspective, but for anyone running a business that has some complexity. And you're like, I want to know what's going on in the business. Like, what is, what are you actually doing? And what is the report that comes out? And how often are you doing that? And all that kind of stuff? So I can, tell me so I can steal it.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. For me, it's still usually in kind of like playing around mode. One of the things is the MCP servers disconnect and then I get annoyed.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  And so, you know, you have to just kind of reconnect and whatever. It's not a huge deal.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  But there are, there are a lot of little paper cuts still in a technology this new that you're going to expect that can hold back some amount of your usage. One of the things that I've, I've found really helpful, kind of at the meta level, and I'm sure you've had other guests talk about this, is the practice of just collecting notes for the, for the AI by the AI and kind of edited and curated by yourself. So, you know, I have a, like a, I can't remember if I call it a note. I think of a notes folder, a research folder, or something like that in a special Git repo

• 28:32Speaker 01

  that I, that I use just for this sort of like internal stuff. And I'm like, hey, when you find interesting customer quotes, put them in this folder and give the full citation. So that the next time I start asking interesting questions, it doesn't have to go searching through the MCP servers again. It has them kind of cached in.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Just on desk in markdown files.

• 28:55Dan Shipper?

  Wait, that's crazy. Wait, so how are you get like, what are you, what are you using to write into that into that git repo? Like, is it Claude code? Is it, are you using T G P T? Like, how does it get in there?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I use, I use Claude code these days for that kind of thing.

• 29:09Dan Shipper?

  And so you just have Claude code open and running and then a new customer testimonial comes in and you're just like, hey, can you throw this in my like git master company git knowledge repository, basically. And, and then whenever you need anything later, you're like Claude, like go search through my master repository to figure out where the best customer quote is for this.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 29:34Dan Shipper?

  That's fucking so cool. Um, can we see it?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Um, no, it's too messy and probably has a lot of confidential information, the latter being more, more important.

• 29:46Dan Shipper?

  Is it, when you say it's messy, like, are you having Claude organize it at all? Or like, how is it structured?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  There's a lot that that I want us to do here that we haven't had the chance to do yet. There's some, there's some other lower hanging fruit that that I'm working through that our business team is working through right now, just on the, on the basics of your kind of CRM systems and so on. But, and so it's not, it's not well structured now, but I think that's fine. Yeah, I, I, I'm not, I don't plan to prioritize structuring it super, super well until we're using it more, I'm using it more broadly because, you know, I use this stuff some of the time. One of the, one of the business people on the team uses it a fair amount. I think like one or two kind of of our customer support engineers use, uses this

• 30:37Speaker 01

  stuff a lot, but it's not yet kind of broader than that. And I would like, I would like it to get there. And once we see how everything's evolving, I think that's when we'll start bringing in more structure. But as it is, Claude code can, can handle unstructured stuff really well. So you don't have to think about it too, too hard in advance, in my view. You can move things around later.

• 30:59Dan Shipper?

  What else do you have in there other than customer quotes?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  SQL queries. So, you know, I'm a software developer. I don't write a lot of code these days, but you know, I spend a lot of time doing that. And so when I say, hey, you know, can you look up, you know, I might be, hey, how is our month on month growth of XYZ metric over the last three months? You know, I did this recently, I did this for my last board prep. And it came out with a pretty good answer right away. And I was like, wow, this is awesome. And then I kind of looked a little bit deeper and I was like, oh, I actually want to exclude, you know, these users from this analysis and I want to filter it this way and filter it that way. And I kind of imbued more of this business context into that SQL query.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  And I iterated with, with Claude Code to get it to be better and better for the specific kind of metric that I was looking for, the specific kind of story that I was trying to tell. And then I got it to a good place and I was like, great, let's dump this to, you know, an analysis folder for, or an analytics folder for future use.

• 32:07Dan Shipper?

  And then next time you're doing your board prep, you can be like, hey, what was that query that we did last time? And it'll presumably go get it.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:15Dan Shipper?

  That's really cool. What else?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  You know, as any software team is these days, we're, we're using this also for, for, hey, a customer comes in with a question. Can Claude Code just fix it? You know, and so you'll have, in some cases, a linear ticket is filed and then, you know, our support engineers are really very technical. And so they may not have the, the wall clock time to go down and chase down the fix themselves to, you know, incoming bug. They have the technical skill, but guess what? Another customer writes in two minutes later and, and they want to jump on that. They don't want to be knee deep in the debugger.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And so something that we do sometimes is they'll file the ticket in case, and by default, it'll maybe they intend to do it later or some other engineer is going to be doing it later. But hey, can we, can we see if Claude Code can just take a crack at it? Is that going to work out 100% of the time? Definitely not. Is that going to work out 50% of the time? Still no, to be honest with you. But. Can that improve the overall efficiency?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. We're still, I would say, experimental there. But but we're seeing a lot of promise.

• 33:42Dan Shipper?

  That's really interesting. Okay, well, I know you also, you know, in our in our pre-production call, you were talking about you have a big vision for the future of AI. Do you want to do you want to talk talk me through that?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I would love to, you know. We talked earlier about how agentic AI can can make

• 34:05Speaker 01

  operators' lives a lot easier by taking their, you know, certain pedestrian tasks and sort of running with it independently. And that's something that I think, as an industry, we're almost on the cusp of.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  And

• 34:19Speaker 01

  if you start stepping, you know, you ask how you get there, and you also start asking about the steps beyond that and beyond that. A big part of of the way I see things unfolding from here, I like to say, is the the future of AI is cyborgs,

• 34:38Speaker 01

  which is like, sort of like, extra ridiculous, because like, what is a cyborg other than like, already like a robot? But, you know, cyborg, as I understand it, is a term that means you're sort of like part, you know, person and then part machine. And in this case, I mean, when you go and talk to an agent,

• 35:01Speaker 01

  what you're going to be getting is part GPT neural net LLM, part AI, and part code, where the the machine, quote unquote, that I'm talking about is is traditional CPU, not GPU, software. And to me, I think I expect this to play out in two main ways. One is your kind of one-off operational use cases, like we were talking about a minute ago. And then the other is production software. And in in the use case we were talking about a minute ago, where someone needs to kind of perform some tricky one-off action with a bunch of points and clicks.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  And now we want an AI to just do a bunch of tool calls.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  The way I actually see that happening and what we're building towards is code execution. So rather than the model having a bajillion tools, model has two tools. One to execute code where it just kind of has a text box of like, hey, put in some TypeScript and you're going to use this API's TypeScript SDK and you're just going to write stripe. Transactions dot list or stripe dot, you know, charges dot list. And you're going to stripe dot customers dot retrieve and stripe dot refunds dot create. This is really easy for models. They're really good at writing code.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  And if you give that tool a little bit of sort of a readme where you say, here's an example request and here's some other resources, some other API calls that you can make. It's really good at extrapolating from patterns with if the SDK is sort of an API are well-formed and predictable. And then you give it an additional tool to kind of search the docs and ask questions to the docs and anything it's not sure about or gets wrong on the first try, you give it the documentation. And what this does for that scenario that we were talking about earlier is you have very, very limited impact on the context window upfront.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  And we're talking about 1,000 tokens or something like that, maybe less. And the context impact of doing a whole bunch of paginated list requests, zero. You know, the, the model will go look for somebody named Dan and it'll double check that the purchase of stripey socks and you might write three nested for loops. But then only at the end, when it found the right thing, it'll console dot log, found Dan, customer ID, blah, blah, blah, transaction ID, blah, blah, blah. And then create refund, you know, refund ID, one, two, three. And the context.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Hit coming back from all of this is going to be like 10 lines of text. You know, it's really minimal. And all of this will run really, really quickly, too. So you don't have a round trip to the model every time you're doing something like this. It's just CPU code and it runs in a server in the cloud right next to the Stripe API in AWS somewhere, probably. And it goes super, super fast.

• 38:15Dan Shipper?

  Okay, so what I am understanding you saying is like the language model has a tool where it can write code and send that code to this tool that the, you know, whoever the company is, whether it's Stripe or whatever, whoever's MCP server you're using, they'll go and execute that code and that code is going to interact with their API and then return the results rather than like these sort of, you know, you have 50 different, you have 50 different possible tool calls and, you know, all that stuff. It's just model writes API code and API provider executes that code, runs it on their API and returns the results. Why wouldn't I just, why wouldn't my model just like write the code that I then run

• 38:59Dan Shipper?

  myself instead of relying on an API provider to do it?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  I expect that that will happen a lot more. I will expect, I expect that the code execution tool is going to become the most widely used tool. The problem, one of the problems that we have today is that the code execution tool doesn't work so well with libraries. LLMs have a hard time working with library and knowing exactly what version of the library it's using, using the right version, probably usually the most latest version. And not hallucinating, you know, aspects of the API and knowing how to iterate if it hallucinates wrong. And if it can't use any library off NPM or, you know, the Python package index or anything

• 39:49Speaker 01

  like that, really, really well, basically perfectly out of the box, then, okay, well, forget about using a library. At that point, you just have to hit. The raw HTTP API. And at that point, in order to figure out what's in there, you need the whole open API spec. And you're back at square one because that document is massive. And furthermore, something that's really scary about that is if you don't have a typed library with with static typing, where the computer can say what you're trying to do is wrong, then the LLM will try to make an API request that is wrong some percentage of the time. The code execution tool can run a type checker and say, oh, you know, you're asking about

• 40:32Speaker 01

  stripe dot transactions dot list, but that actually doesn't exist. Stripe doesn't have a transactions API. You might want payment intents, you might want orders, you might want balance transactions. Which one do you want? And if you if the API provider is doing a great job building this tool, it'll return the documentation for all of these things in line. It might have its own AI, look at what the model's trying to do and come up with a suggestion. And that and that sub agent, you know, is well trained, specified, always updating, and isn't burdened with the context of the full conversation.

• 41:08Dan Shipper?

  What do you think of the security model?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  The security model is really, really interesting. This is another area where we're really starting to think about things at stainless, and I'm getting really excited about it. So if any listeners are really interested in this and have some ideas or want to talk, you know, please do reach out. At the end of the day, I think the security has to take place at the API layer itself. Right now, you see people trying to implement security by sort of limiting what's exposed through MCP, and that kind of makes sense. But at the end of the day, you could do anything that's in the API under the hood, right?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  And what people should be doing is using OAuth with granular permissions with with proper scopes. And at that point, the security happens the right place, which is at the API layer. There's limitations to OAuth scopes, and it's pretty hard to build. So it'd be nice if someone made that easy. But in my view, that's kind of the that direction is sort of the right, the right layer.

• 42:19Dan Shipper?

  So going back to my earlier question, I'm thinking about the idea of having a model write code that then the API provider. executes to, you know, interact with their API and then returns the results. Would you ever consider just creating a tool use tool that developers use? Because like, for example, I'm thinking about for Quora. Got all these tools. Maybe Gmail is gonna build, you know, like a code use thing or whatever. But really, I just want, I would probably use what you're talking about inside of Quora. But we would need a tool use tool or but it's not a tool use tool.

• 43:01Dan Shipper?

  It's like a, it's a computer, it's a computer use tool where, and I know OpenAI has this, but it's not really well built for lots of libraries and stuff. It's not a custom environment. Like, I need a computer use tool where I control the environment and I can install different libraries in it and be able to call it anytime to then call any API or it has to have network access, basically.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:27Dan Shipper?

  You guys should build that.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  We're working on it.

• 43:30Dan Shipper?

  Fuck, yeah. You're building it for developers who want to access MCP servers or people who are providing MCP servers?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  We're starting with people who are providing MCP servers. But ultimately, I think that we're going to need this to work such that you can give the model a code execution environment where it can hit not only the Stripe integration, but also the Salesforce integration and also anything else. And but not too much anything else, right? And so one of the advantages of starting where we're starting of just one API provider is that you ensure that there's no network connections allowed out of that sandbox where we're running the code to anything other than, in this case, api.stripe.com. And that's, that's really, really critical for security for something like this. And so there's ways to expand that bit by bit and keep things and keep things secure.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  It'll, it'll, it'll take some time. The other thing I think to point out, as you see some of these generalizations, is it's not just that you want this like code execution sandbox to work really well for any API, for any library, which I think we really do. I think, I think we really need that. You also start to see that. This is just a powerful model for AI doing stuff. And sometimes you want, you realize that the thing that the AI did this one time in this one-off case is actually enduringly useful. Maybe anytime a customer writes into support and says, hey, my socks had holes in them, you should automatically get a refund, you know? Maybe you want that, maybe you don't.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  But there's a lot of stuff that people do one or one time and then two times and then three times, and then they say, okay, we should automate this. Right? And that's, and that's what software teams do all day, every day. Right? And we're going to be, I think we're also going to be seeing that with AI, where the same, the same code search tool that we're talking about, all the same prompting that will make an AI really, really good at interacting with an API in one of these code sandboxes, kind of like almost quote unquote, in its brain. Working like write code in its head, run the code in its head, see the results and then move forward with your, with your, with your query, with your task. It should be able to say, okay, actually this is enduringly useful code. Let me commit this to the repo.

• 45:50Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, chat is a really good interface for exploring, but sometimes you just want a dashboard, you know? You just, I just want to like log into my Stripe dashboard and see all the stuff without having to be like, what is my MRR? It should just show up, you know, because I just do that every day. But I want to, I want to push you as a, as a hashtag value add investor. Because I, I think that there's a, I think that there's this thing that happens in AI where often the first attempt at something like this, people try to be really cautious. And I'm sure that your customers care about you being cautious, like big enterprise customers. But the things that get adopted are often the ones that are willing

• 46:33Dan Shipper?

  to take the risk to be YOLO very early. So an example is Dolly was like wholly private for like a long time. And people were like posting some images, but you couldn't get in. And then stable diffusion was just like, fuck it. Like anyone can use this. And then that just really started the whole image generation wave.

• 46:53Dan Shipper?

  Obviously, stable diffusion sort of fumbled the bag, but they had a lead for a little while.

• 46:58Dan Shipper?

  Same thing for Claude Code, honestly. Like, if you look at Codex is not like this as much anymore. But if you look at the difference between Codex CLI and Claude Code, Claude Code was just like, fuck it. Like Yolo mode, it's super industrious. It has a sandbox, but you can just do dangerously skip permissions. And Codex just fell way behind because it was first it was in the browser. And so their whole thing was the whole thing was like locked down. And then it was in the it was in the in the CLI, but it was really built for pair programming. And so it just wasn't particularly industrious. It wouldn't go off and do a bunch of stuff. It didn't it would get locked out of doing certain things, even if you did full auto mode. And now they've like caught up because they're they're like, yeah, you can just let it do whatever you want.

• 47:41Dan Shipper?

  And so I would I would really push you on. There might be a version that you could do like today or tomorrow or like very soon for individual developers that would let them set up this environment that, for example, I would use like immediately. And I care about security, but I care I care a lot less than some ex, you know, gigantic enterprise company. But I think the people like me who are building at this scale

• 48:07Dan Shipper?

  are eventually hopefully going to be the big companies. But we're the ones that are really doing the AI first adoption, not the big not the big companies.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Well, I would love to get this in your hands. What are some of the APIs your team uses the most?

• 48:19Dan Shipper?

  I'm thinking we have a bunch of different products, but I'm thinking right now about Quora, the email, the email assistant. And it has all of the like the the big APIs that it's using. It's mostly the Gmail, the Gmail API. And so you're interacting with the assistant over chat. And then it has a list of tools that are like, you know, archive email or draft email or send email or whatever. Like, there's a whole categorized tool, so it categorizes your mail mail in certain ways.

• 48:49Dan Shipper?

  I think we would definitely try out something like this because it would, if it ran the same way, it would make it much more flexible for us to make more tools and not break old ones, you know? It's really interesting.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  I mean, in a sense, what I actually predict is that people who are quote unquote "building tools," once we have a code execution kind of super tool like I'm talking about, is that the only way you really quote unquote "build a tool" is with instructions, with prompts. And the full power of everything you could possibly do in the API, in the Gmail API, for example, it's all there in one tool. But sometimes you have specific tasks or specific categories of work that you want to describe in a particular way to help the LLM perform a sequence of actions as productively as possible.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  And at that point, the only work in engineering that you have to do is prompt engineering. We'll see if it's that quote unquote "easy." As we all know, prompt engineering can be really tricky.

• 50:02Dan Shipper?

  It's hard.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  But I think that's part of the vision. That being said, we do have some pretty nifty ways with the MTP servers that we generate today to help developers mix and match all the parts of the different tools underlying, all the different parts of the API, as they compose and write their own tools.

• 50:23Dan Shipper?

  This is awesome. So for people who are listening and want to know more from you or more from Stainless, where should they find you?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Stainless.com. That's our website.

• 50:35Dan Shipper?

  Awesome. Or at least visit Stainless.com. Alex, great to have you on. I can't wait to do more of this when you have some of these new things launched. This is really, really fun. And yeah, great to chat.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Thanks, Dan. You, too.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, folks. You absolutely, positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard. But instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs about ChatGPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely, hopelessly in love with you.