API Design
8 articles on API Design.
Designing Async, Long-Running APIs for AI Agents
AI agents kick off tasks that run for minutes — synchronous request/response breaks down fast. A practical guide to the async job pattern: 202 + status URLs, polling vs webhooks vs streaming, durable queues, and idempotent resumption.
May 30, 2026·6 min readMCP vs Direct API Calls: The Token-Efficiency Debate (2026)
MCP exploded to 10,000+ servers, but in 2026 many teams are moving back to direct API calls and CLIs over token cost — ~200 tokens per CLI command vs 32,000–82,000 for MCP. A clear-eyed breakdown of when MCP is worth it and when it isn't.
May 26, 2026·5 min readPutting an ML Model in Production: A Backend Engineer's Guide to Inference APIs
Serving a model is a backend problem, not a data-science one. A practical guide to production inference APIs — latency vs throughput, batching, GPU concurrency, caching, autoscaling cold starts, and the failure modes that don't exist in a notebook.
May 24, 2026·6 min readBuilding Backends for AI Agents: Idempotency, Retries & State (2026)
AI agents retry, run for minutes, and call your APIs in unpredictable loops. The backend is where agent reliability lives. A practical guide to idempotency, safe retries, durable state, and observability for agent-facing systems in 2026.
May 22, 2026·7 min readIdempotency Keys: How We Stopped Double-Charging Customers
A retry on a slow payment request charged a customer twice. A practical guide to idempotency keys — how to design the key, store it atomically, handle in-flight duplicates, and make any unsafe POST safe to retry.
March 18, 2026·6 min readgRPC vs REST vs GraphQL: Performance Deep Dive with Benchmarks
Comprehensive performance comparison of gRPC, REST, and GraphQL. Real benchmarks, latency analysis, throughput testing, and when to use each protocol in production systems.
December 19, 2025·9 min readREST API Design Best Practices: Building APIs That Developers Love
Learn how to design clean, scalable, and developer-friendly REST APIs. Covers URL structure, HTTP methods, status codes, pagination, versioning, error handling, and security best practices.
December 12, 2024·8 min readGraphQL vs REST API: Complete Comparison Guide for 2024
Understand when to use GraphQL vs REST API. Compare performance, flexibility, caching, real-world use cases, and learn practical implementation with code examples in Python and Node.js.
December 11, 2024·9 min read