I am just processing what happened the last couple of days at APIDays NYC. I spent Wednesday and Thursday. I love events that I can sleep at home each night, but I’d say that APIDays NYC is my new favorite event because it is focused on APIs, has many of the usual suspects I like to see from the API realm, but also because the bullshit levels came down a little bit from last year.
APIDays NYC 2025 was my first real conference since Covid. It was also where I ran into Jerome Louvel, who is my co-founder in Naftiko. Jerome shared his initial vision with me there. I was more interested in talking people I know like Jerome at the event than I was talking to any vendor. The bullshit levels of 2025 were pretty high, and I wasn’t in the mood for the whims of the irrational market, where this year I have found my peace with the irrationality, and still think it is just as dumb as I did last year, just have a thicker skin for the bullshit this year.
Artificial Intelligence still dominated things, but there were fewer of the pure AI plays present, and more talks were rooted in the realities of enterprise integration of AI, not just hustling whatever you were selling with AI. People in the hallways were talking about AI, but it was a lot more pragmatic discussion and skeptical views on the realities we all face with integrating AI successfully into production. I am here for these conversations, and this type of ongoing discussions is what I am looking to drive with Naftiko Capabilities, so it fits in well with where my head is at right now, compared with last year. The anxiety about AI is still there, but people are getting used to the discourse, and seem like we are all getting kind of used to the rhetoric.
It is clear that AI isn’t going away, but we’ve hit the bullshit high water mark. I am curious how far the bullshit recedes. I found the splitting of hairs around what is acceptable around what is acceptable and what is not acceptable with API to be a curious distraction. You can use it for coding, but you can’t use it for writing articles. You can use it for generating an OpenAPI, but you can’t use it for generating documentation. There was a lot of that. I am not going to be shaming anyone for using AI, but I have accepted of people shaming me for using AI. I don’t think there is any outside of it. You are using it or you aren’t, and there are no indulgences in this game. You use AI as it is, or you do not use AI. I accept many of us do not have an option. I am not looking for absolution of my sins, I accept that I am complicit in what is going on with tech.
The reduced levels of AI delusions at APIDays NC gives me hope that I will be able to build an integration business is today’s market. It feels like enterprises are still wrestling with the good and bad of it, despite the markets going so crazy over it. I feel there are more dissenting voices, and there are genuinely smart people willing to ask the hard questions. Having an event like APIDays realize they need to be the place for these conversations also helps me feel better about things. I was concerned it wouldn’t be a foundation for reaching out across many different industries and regions if AI infiltrated too much, but I think the leadership read the writing on the wall and resisted, keeping the event the place where you can work this shit out.
