Because the Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) was introduced by Anthropic a 12 months in the past, we’ve seen immense progress in giant language fashions (LLMs) and agentic use instances. Earlier than MCP turned the de facto agentic normal, builders constructing brokers on high of LLMs must hard-code the connective tissue between the LLM and apps. Builders would wish to construct customized integrations between their LLM consumer and the apps required by an finish person’s immediate. With MCP, builders can now join straight with exterior information sources, so their LLM can learn information from and write information to the linked purposes.
However there’s a breaking level the place issues begin to crumble. The robustness and efficacy of agentic options rely on the standard of the appliance programming interfaces (APIs) which can be utilized by an MCP server. MCPs expose instruments which can be invoked by LLMs, and these instruments usually reference particular person API endpoints. The standard of APIs, subsequently, straight correlates with the LLM consumer’s correct discovery and execution of person prompts.
The hierarchy of developer wants
Delivering high quality, constant, and intuitive APIs is a matter of a company’s cultural priorities. At Cisco, we’re lucky to have government management sponsorship of our platform API floor space, which helps us ship high quality APIs throughout the enterprise.
We’ve discovered that it’s useful to prioritize API roadmaps primarily based on a hierarchy of developer wants.
Maslow’s hierarchy of wants illustrates the idea that human motivation is pushed by 5 ranges of want. Organized in a pyramid, these are: physiological, security, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. The idea means that individuals are motivated to meet primary wants first earlier than progressing to higher-level wants for self-fulfillment.
Our hierarchy of developer wants takes Maslow’s pyramid and extends it to rank developer ache factors and options in response to primary wants, enterprise wants, and vertical or industry-specific wants.
The foundational parts: API protection and completeness
The developer hierarchy of wants provides a framework for our product and engineering groups to prioritize their roadmaps. For instance, the muse of API high quality relies on protection or completeness. With out extant API endpoints, nothing upstream issues—not documentation, code samples, nor developer relations efforts.
Determine 1: The hierarchy of developer wants provides a framework for product and engineering roadmap prioritization.
Subsequent comes the necessity for a high-quality OpenAPI Specification (OAS) and the interior engineering API growth lifecycle. An OAS file might have a number of APIs, but when the prose round every endpoint is sparse, or sure endpoints are lacking schemas and documented parameters, then it forces builders to both guess and check or reverse engineer which capabilities every API endpoint serves by means of rote testing. Each choices supply a poor developer expertise.
It’s essential for any group with a developer movement to put money into linting and static evaluation of recent APIs being developed, in order that inside engineers can simply ship new API performance with out being specialists within the API framework. A fantastic instance of that is Cisco DevNet’s open-source software, API Insights, which permits builders to audit their API specs to implement finest practices as early as potential within the growth cycle. Additionally, many individuals aren’t conscious that if the OAS is lacking schemas, it basically means software program growth kits (SDKs) and infrastructure as code (IaC) instruments like Terraform and Ansible can’t use these endpoints—no matter their launch standing—since SDKs and IaC instruments require the flexibility to auto-generate tooling from the OAS.
The ethical of the story: All issues rely on OAS, particularly AI.
Documentation and scalability
The subsequent degree of significance is having intuitive documentation. In case your APIs are improbable however nobody can discover which one does what, or your data structure is a nightmare, it negates the hassle your crew put into transport high quality APIs and OAS. Builders should not monoliths. Some are profession software program engineers, however many, particularly within the networking {industry}, are technical professionals like networking engineers who’re studying learn how to write scripts or construct primary internet apps utilizing REST APIs for the primary time of their profession. Accordingly, nice developer documentation is a must have earlier than anybody can perceive what is feasible for an AI agent use case.
Transferring to the subsequent degree of developer wants, now we have enterprise scale and high quality. Organizations that promote to Fortune 500 corporations or brownfield enterprises know that scale and the CIA-triad (confidentiality, integrity, availability) are mission-critical tenets. These tenets should be assured earlier than builders will really feel snug constructing customized options on high of an API, no matter whether or not these options are conventional scripts, app integrations, or agentic troubleshooting options.
At Cisco, we’re proud to carefully accomplice with our largest prospects and managed service supplier companions to make sure that our platform works easily for everybody, from a mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar store to a Fortune 100 world conglomerate that wants redundancy, immense scale, and fee limits, in addition to the very best uptime accessible.
Simplifying API consumption and vertical software
Our penultimate degree of developer wants is the place we get into abstraction and obfuscation to simplify how APIs are consumed. SDKs and IaC instruments like Ansible and Terraform are the bread and butter of huge enterprises that require widespread automation. IT groups are rising leaner, and networking engineers are anticipated to do extra with much less. If all different developer wants have been met, it turns into simple for a company to generate and keep SDKs and developer instruments like an MCP server.
For instance, Cisco Meraki and Cisco Catalyst Middle each keep high quality OAS recordsdata, which prospects can use to generate an MCP server inside a couple of minutes with fashionable API instruments like Postman. This permits a developer who’s attempting to construct a customized agent to have the ability to achieve this in days, not weeks or months, all due to the standard of our APIs, OAS, and docs, and our skill to make sure that high quality at enterprise scale.
Lastly, what actually makes a developer platform shine are code samples and integrations. If all different developer wants are met, this creates an ecosystem situation the place builders can simply create new scripts, integrations, and instruments and share them with the platform neighborhood within the type of code samples, libraries, and integrations.
In the end, delivering full, high-quality APIs, sturdy documentation, and an engaged ecosystem lays the groundwork for innovation and ensures that agentic options can attain their full potential.
