devdave

Generating SDKs from APIs is better done by coding agents now than with tools like Stainless. In the real world, every spec is wrong, incomplete and inconsistent. Someone has to go and patch the spec before you can get good results with a rigid code generator. And Stainless APIs still don't give you the errors! They produce nice looking SDKs, but lack the most critical aspect of APIs - the "unhappy paths", which are usually far more in number than happy paths, and are what makes the difference between a great and a terrible UX. Stainless support many targets, but ask anyone who's used Cloudflare's terraform provider and you'll quickly realize that it's not magic. If the spec sucks, the provider sucks. And most specs suck. Distilled and Alchemy address this with AI. We use coding agents for 100%, so each new SDK we onboard is effectively "hand crafted". AI adapts "manually" to the nuances and weirdness of the spec and API. We share some code, but we don't try and squeeze specs into one code generator. Every time we make one, it becomes useful context for the next one and drives the flywheel. Since we are targeting Effect, we value errors more than the happy path. None of the APIs we've worked with except for AWS have documented their errors in the spec. And AWS still hasn't documented 100% (maybe 80-90% at best). AI patches these missing errors (and categorizes them as retryable, etc.) by interacting with the service and observing its actual behavior. This then feeds into Alchemy which uses AI to generate hand-crafted IaC resources and our Effect abstraction on top. This generation process reverse engineers the API's actual behavior and produces: 1) Effect-native SDKs for every cloud, and 2) IaC Resources for every cloud, 3) Alchemy Bindings for every cloud API.

Source: Anthropic is in advanced talks to acquire New York-based Stainless, which helps developers generate SDKs from APIs, for at least $300M (The Information) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)