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Inside Stainless: The Developer Tools Startup Anthropic Just Bought for $300 Million
AI & I by Every · 2026-05-20
Speaker 1 | 00:00 - 00:31
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 worked on. 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’ job is to help computers talk to each other.
Speaker 1 | 00:31 - 00:59
They make the…
🐦 X/Twitter 热点
Swyx (@swyx)
- pod link and more ctx [10 ❤️]
- btw we did a bake off of Exa vs competitors and it took all of 1.5 hrs for the team to unanimously converge on exa lol.
so proud to see my former landlords crush it - time travel back to last year and listen to a pre pmf @WilliamBryk to understand how to spot companies on a generational tear [222 ❤️ 9 🔄]
- very belated but in retrospect i think @sama’s mythical “build a business that gets better when models get better” is basically what I called Agent Labs here.
seeing a very direct correlation with model performance and agent lab revenue, discontinuity in Q4 2025
(clip from @patrickc’s stripe sessions) [46 ❤️ 4 🔄]
Josh Woodward (@joshwoodward)
- You found it! :) [146 ❤️ 3 🔄]
- Glad you’re liking it! [158 ❤️ 4 🔄]
Kevin Weil (@kevinweil)
- The next in a series of firsts for AI and mathematics! [38 ❤️]
Peter Yang (@petergyang)
- Maybe not working at a company that’s doing layoffs and PSC every few months is better for mental health. [98 ❤️ 1 🔄]
Google Labs (@GoogleLabs)
- From playing the games to designing the games in minutes. Just choose your characters, set the scene, and let Project Genie do the rest. The transformation is wild 🦒
See Genie in action at this year’s Google I/O sandbox: [177 ❤️ 23 🔄]
- We love seeing all of the worlds you’ve been creating with Genie.
SO much so, that we’re excited to announce Project Genie is now fully available to all Google AI Ultra subscribers globally (18+). [148 ❤️ 16 🔄]
Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg)
- This will bring AI to 42% of the web. Every model, every provider, every modality (text, image, video, audio). [229 ❤️ 5 🔄]
Aaron Levie (@levie)
- Great post on FDEs. Everyone should read it if you’re interested in this job category. This is a job that is going to be around as long as AI keeps changing rapidly, which it inevitably will.
People often wonder why isn’t this like just deploying other forms of technology in the past, like cloud.
Because something like cloud adoption affected a fairly concentrated set of users (developers and IT), and generally didn’t require a fundamental change to the workflows of employees to get the benefits of the new service being delivered on the cloud. At best you went to one training session and you were done.
With agents, the work to implement them is not only highly technical, but they directly impact the underlying workflows that people participate in. This means there’s a ton of technical work and change management that comes with it.
Further, the pace of change of cloud wasn’t nearly as quick, so there was a lot more time for best practices to propagate. Now, every model change means either something new can be done that wasn’t possible before, or some piece of scaffolding is now redundant or holding you back.
This is why it’s commonly easier for a vendor or partner that’s seen the implementation hundreds or thousands of times help do the work, even with internal support from the customer.
So, this job isn’t going away any time soon, and will be a great path for a lot of technical talent, especially early career. [556 ❤️ 62 🔄]
Garry Tan (@garrytan)
- Idea fusion is fun, and idea fusion with LSD (lateral synaptic drift) is even more fun [74 ❤️ 7 🔄]
- Exa is what I trust for all my agents. We use it at YC. We use it in all my OpenClaw and Hermes Agents. There is no other option that is as fast, as reliable, and as complete.
When your agents need to search the web, accept no substitutes. [1102 ❤️ 56 🔄]
- The benefits of AI are real now, but we will never get there in the United States (and America will cede its leadership) if we can’t solve the bigger media issue of a mass smokescreen by forces that want to destroy America [280 ❤️ 38 🔄]
Matt Turck (@mattturck)
- When Kendall buys Vaulter [79 ❤️ 4 🔄]
Zara Zhang (@zarazhangrui)
- I think that in an AI-native team,
- ICs should start thinking like managers: how to delegate tasks to agents, how to set standards & verify output
- Managers should start thinking like ICs: how to be more hands-on builders instead of just doing people management [40 ❤️ 4 🔄]
- Great slide from the “How to thrive as an AI-era developer” session at Google I/O today
I think this T-shape will apply to not just developers but every job function
We need to
- go deeper with our domain expertise
- go wider with adjacent skills and fields
- learn to use AI well on top [151 ❤️ 20 🔄]
Nikunj Kothari (@nikunj)
- If you don’t have time to read 308 pages of the @SpaceX S-1, here’s a summary that Claude helped me put together based on the most interesting findings 🚀 [17 ❤️ 2 🔄]
- Being a founder is so freaking hard man.. chewing glass every day. If you fail, no one cares. If you succeed, you are given way more problems. Sometimes I really wonder how many founders wake up in the morning and ask themselves “is it really worth it”.
Starting a company is so glorified - but building, scaling and maintaining one is a different story. This is why it’s so important to do this for the right reasons - solve problems you are deeply passionate about and one you’ll do even if the world is against you. At least there will be light at the end of the tunnel that’s constantly drawing you in on those days when you are questioning your motivation.
I have never had the courage to personally start a company for this reason. Just wanted to say to the ones going through this - I see you, I salute you and I admire you 🫡 [791 ❤️ 39 🔄]
Peter Steinberger (@steipete)
- Can’t recommend @cotypist enough. Autocomplete everywhere. [1362 ❤️ 86 🔄]
Dan Shipper (@danshipper)
- @StainlessAPI @RattrayAlex YouTube:
Spotify: [1 ❤️] - Anthropic just acquired developer tool startup @StainlessAPI, whose biggest customers were OpenAI and Google.
Back in October, I had Stainless CEO and founder Alex Rattray (@RattrayAlex) on AI & I to talk about MCP servers and the unglamorous plumbing that makes AI agents actually work. (Disclosure: I’m a small investor in the company.) After Monday’s news, the conversation lands differently—in it, Alex essentially walks me through the design thinking for building APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers that Anthropic paid a reported $300 million for.
On @every’s AI & I, we get into MCP and the future of the AI-native internet.
Highlights include:
- Design MCP servers to be lean and precise. Alex’s best practices for building reliable MCP servers start with keeping the toolset small, giving each tool a precise name and description, and minimizing the inputs and outputs the model has to handle. At Stainless, they also often add a JSON filter on top to strip out unnecessary data.
- Make complex APIs manageable with dynamic mode. To solve the problem of how an AI figures out which tool to use in larger APIs, Stainless switches to “dynamic mode,” where the model gets only three tools: List the endpoints, pick one and learn about it, and then execute it.
- MCP servers as business copilots. At Stainless, Alex uses MCP servers to connect tools like @NotionHQ and @HubSpot, so he can ask questions like, “Which customers signed up last week?” The system queries multiple databases and returns a summary that would’ve otherwise taken multiple logins and searches.
- Create a “brain” for your company with Claude Code. Alex built a shared company brain at Stainless by keeping Claude Code running on his system and asking it to save useful inputs—like customer feedback and SQL queries—into GitHub. Over time, this creates a curated archive his team can query easily.
- The future of MCP is code execution. Instead of giving models hundreds of tools, Alex believes the most powerful setup will be a simple code execution tool and a doc search tool. The AI writes code against an API’s SDK, runs it on a server, and checks the docs when it gets stuck.
This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to understand MCP—and learn how to use them as a competitive edge.
Watch below!
Timestamps
Introduction: 00:01:15
APIs and MCP, the connectors of the new internet: 00:05:09
Why MCP exists: 00:11:00
Why MCP servers are hard to get right: 00:17:15
Design principles for reliable MCP servers: 00:20:24
Using MCP for business ops at Stainless: 00:25:06
Alex’s take on the security model for MCP: 00:40:57
How one-off AI actions become permanent production software: 00:44:42 [51 ❤️ 3 🔄]
Aditya Agarwal (@adityaag)
- This is a really big deal. [16 ❤️ 1 🔄]
- It was amazing to have Feross do his -1 journey @southpkcommons and to have been an early partner.
Very proud of the progress the company has made.
Lots to build! [29 ❤️ 5 🔄]
- Apply to @southpkcommons if you’d like to join us [4 ❤️]
Sam Altman (@sama)
- three of the things we are most excited about:
- AGI accelerating research
- AGI accelerating companies
- personal AGI accelerating everyone in achieving their goals
today it was great to announce the unit distance result.
yesterday it was great to announce that we are offering to invest $2M in openai credits into every YC company.
now we need to increase our efforts on the third! [5942 ❤️ 320 🔄]
- a general-purpose model solved a major open problem in mathematics.
we’ll be saying this a lot over the coming years, but this is a kinda big milestone.
i’m very excited for AI to greatly extend our understanding of the world, but still, i have complicated feelings today. [4763 ❤️ 281 🔄]
由 Follow Builders 自动生成 · 2026-05-21