AI-friendly API design buy vs. build, and scaling DevEx | Tom Hacohen (CEO & Founder, Svix)

Request // Response

In this episode of Request Response, I sat down with Tom Hacohen, founder and CEO of Swix, the Webhooks-as-a-Service platform.

Tom shares the origin story of Swix—which started as a side project to escape the pain of webhook maintenance—and how it’s grown into essential infrastructure for API-first companies.

We dive into why great developer experience means solving actual problems and how AI will reshape API design—from brittle CRUD endpoints to high-level abstractions agents can reason over.

If you're building APIs, AI infrastructure, or just tired of rewriting webhook engines, this episode is a clear-eyed look at where platform engineering is heading—and what it means to ship something developers actually love.

Show Notes

[01:18] – The founding story of Swix and the underestimated complexity of webhooks
[04:24] – Prioritizing developer experience over implementation details
[05:42] – Early solutions: replacing homegrown webhook infrastructures
[07:15] – Build vs. buy: the case for buying webhook infrastructure
[09:03] – The cost of maintaining v1 and the pain of v2 and beyond
[10:25] – Why companies rewrite their webhook systems multiple times
[12:32] – AI’s limited current impact on build vs. buy decisions
[14:24] – The human side of solution engineering and customer acceleration
[16:29] – Tool calling with LLMs and the rise of abstracted APIs
[18:19] – AI favoring flexible, NLP-friendly endpoints over brittle CRUD
[20:07] – Toward workflow-aware API responses for agents
[22:01] – Meta MCPs and hierarchical API discovery
[23:08] – Swix’s role as AI infrastructure and aligning with AI-oriented standards
[25:56] – What great developer experience really means

Additional Quotes from the Podcast

"No one cares about webhooks. They don't care about your SDKs either. They don't care about any of that. What they care about is either not having to build it or the value that their customers get."

"You can build anything... The real question is: is it worth your time and effort? Is it worth re-learning? Because honestly, writing the code isn’t the hard part—learning all the complexities and edge cases is."

"People often get developer experience wrong—they reduce it to 'good APIs and SDKs' or 'nice docs.' But it’s more than that. It’s about the entire experience—from onboarding to support to observability. Like UI design isn’t just colors, DX isn’t just code. Good DX is making the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard."