AI agent payments have produced four competing specifications, two industry foundations and an enormous amount of coverage in about a year. What they have not yet produced, for the overwhelming majority of merchants, is revenue. The gap between the noise and the numbers is the useful part to understand, because the...
API Development
Articles, guides and tutorials on building and consuming APIs, covering REST, GraphQL, API design principles and developer best practices.
A salesforce integration almost never fails on protocol. Authenticating is a solved problem and posting a record is a solved problem. What ends projects is the daily request allocation and the shape of the data model, both usually discovered about three weeks after go-live, when the nightly job starts returning errors...
Password storage is one of the few areas in software with a genuine right answer, published, maintained and free. It is also one of the most consistently got wrong, because the wrong answers were correct at some point and nobody revisited them. The failure is rarely exotic. It is a system built in 2016 against advice...
API versioning arguments usually start at the wrong end, with where the version number goes. That is the least consequential decision in the whole subject. What matters is which changes require a new version at all, and most teams get that wrong in the direction of complacency: they ship something they believe is...
Database performance work usually begins with someone proposing a bigger instance, and it usually ends with the discovery that one query was doing a sequential scan over four million rows on every page load. The hardware was never the constraint. The plan was. That pattern is consistent enough to be worth stating as a...
The fine-tuning vs RAG question usually arrives as a statement: “we need to fine-tune a model on our data.” It is one of the most expensive sentences in enterprise AI, and it is usually wrong. Not always, but usually. The request nearly always means one of two things: the model does not know about our business, or the...
The case for moving off OpenAI got considerably stronger during 2026. Open-weight models reached a level where the quality gap on ordinary production work became narrow, published pricing undercut the frontier providers, and the weights themselves became downloadable, which turns a supplier relationship into an option....
Most teams treat API security as an authentication problem. They add tokens, check them on every route, and consider the job done. Then a tester changes one number in a URL and reads another customer’s invoice. That gap between “authenticated” and “authorised” is where the majority of real API breaches live, and it is...
The Kimi K3 API arrived with an unusual combination behind it: frontier-adjacent benchmark results, aggressive pricing, and downloadable weights. Moonshot AI published those weights on 27 July 2026, which makes K3 the largest openly available model released so far and the first time a model at this scale has been...
Anyone estimating custom API development cost from the number of endpoints is going to be wrong, usually by a factor of three. Endpoints are the cheapest part. A dozen of them, reading and writing data you already hold, is a fortnight’s work for a competent backend developer. What costs money is everything that turns...