What Breaks When Agents Become the Customer | Svix CEO Tom Hacohen

What breaks when agents become the customer? Most of the integration layer, APIs, SDKs and webhooks alike, was built for human developers and for servers that are always listening. Agents are neither.

Full transcript and chapters: https://chainofthought.show/podcast/78-what-breaks-when-agents-become-the-customer-svix-ceo-tom-hacohen/

When an agent runs on a laptop, closing the lid takes down the tunnel its webhooks come through. When the lid opens, it gets a storm of retries from 12 hours earlier. Svix founder and CEO Tom Hacohen's answer is to let the agent poll for what it missed.

Svix delivers webhooks for companies like Clerk and Resend, and it created Standard Webhooks, the spec OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini have adopted. In this episode of Chain of Thought, Tom joins Conor Bronsdon to talk through designing APIs for agents that adapt, whether agents still need SDKs, and why he wants less code even when agents write it. He also introduces Poke, Svix's new spec for making event-driven APIs work for agents.

This episode is sponsored by Svix.

We cover:

Why events are harder for agents than API calls: the sender controls them, and they arrive outside the agent's sessionHow polling endpoints and Svix's plugins for Hermes and OpenClaw let an agent pick up where it left offWhy Tom calls JSON an abomination and webhooks duct tape, and why worse is better anywayWhy Svix created Standard Webhooks when everyone implemented webhooks differently, and how the spec let Kong and ngrok add webhook verificationWhether agents still need SDKs, and why Svix's skills work like a solutions engineer while its docs stay written for humansWhy Tom wants less code even when agents write it, and what piling patches on patches costsPoke, Svix's early spec for letting agents subscribe to and trigger events across services, released so feedback can shape it while it's still malleableChapters:

(0:00) Duct tape, retry storms and the case for simplicity

(1:19) Why integrations got easier and harder at once

(2:59) How EteSync's webhook requests led to Svix

(5:22) Worse is better: why webhooks persist

(7:15) What changes when an agent receives the event