He’s Building the Plumbing for AI to Use the Internet

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper sits down with Alex Rattray, the founder of Stainless, a startup building a platform for high-quality APIs. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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When you send an email, pay with a credit card, or casually log into X, countless invisible handshakes are taking place behind the scenes. It’s the grand plumbing of the internet that nobody talks about: Programs talk to each other, data moves across services, and to most of us it seems like everything just works.

Those handshakes are powered by APIs, and Alex Rattray has built a company, Stainless, to make them better.

Up to now, that plumbing has only connected humans and computers, but with LLMs becoming active participants in this ecosystem, a new kind of pipe is becoming necessary: model context protocol, or MCP. If APIs are how programs talk to each other, “MCP servers” are how AI can plug into those same systems—they give a language model tools to get work done. (In the case of sending an email, the MCP server would let the LLM search your inbox, draft a reply, and send it on your behalf.) On this episode of AI & I, Rattray joins Dan Shipper to talk about why MCP servers don’t yet work as well as they should, what he’s learning about designing reliable ones, and how Stainless is experimenting with using them inside the company.