Advancing AI Agents with Postman’s Sterling Chin

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone. We're back here at Techstrong tv.

My next guest is Mr. Sterling Chin. Sterling is the senior developer advocate at Homan.

We're going to get into what a senior developer advocate is and what Postman is. We're gonna talk a little bit about AI agents, but first, let's talk a little bit about Sterling and welcome, welcome him to the show, Sterling. Hey man, how are you?

Welcome. Hey, Alan, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Uh, my pleasure. So I'm looking at your background there. I'm glad to see this isn't one of those fake ones.

It looks like we got rockets maybe. Is that what that is there? Oh, yeah.

I am a huge space nerd. Uh, I've been a space nerd my entire life. So, uh, when I moved into tech and started to, you know, be able to explore more, I mean, you can see all the rockets I've got back there.

I've got te, I've got a Saturn five rocket tattoo. Oh, Very cool. It, it space is, I, I, I'm a huge trekkee, and so space is always the final frontier for me.

Absolutely. Have you, have you made it down to Canaveral, Cape Canaveral, the Kennedy Space Center? I have not.

I live in Houston though, so I spend a lot of time Time. Oh, you're in Houston? It's close, yeah.

Okay. If you get a chance, they, they actually have a standard vibe there. Yeah, they've got one here in, uh, the, in the Houston, uh, spa, the Space Center Houston.

Yeah. If you get through Canal. So I did this, I'll do with my kids when they were younger and they had this thing where you could have lunch with an astronaut and, and our astronaut for lunch was, um, Corey Musgrave.

Is it? He, he flew like three or four shuttle. He repaired the Hubble twice.

He was like the Hubble repair man, and you wanna talk about the right stuff. This guy had a law degree, a medical degree, a physics degree, PhD. I mean, he was, my kids didn't know who he was.

They didn't care me. I was sitting there like, I, you know, I couldn't talk. I, I, you know, you want me to sign your picture?

They didn't care. I got the side pictures. I was all for it.

So I'll have to make my way down the Canaveral soon. Yeah. If you can't do the lunch with a natural, I mean, they have space camp there and everything, but you gotta talk to your kids or you gotta adopt a kid or someone bring with you so it, you don't feel embarrassed, you know, going with yourself.

Yeah. Um, but good stuff, man. Good stuff.

And, and it's also great you, I mean, if you can go there and time it around when they have a lunch, you know, it's nice, especially a nighttime lunch. I, I heard from where we live. Yes.

From where I live sometimes you could see the nighttime launches. Right. Wow.

And I'm, I'm three hours south of there by car, so that's how visible they are. Anyway, we went down that rat hole pretty quick. Let's stop talking about space for a second.

Talk to us about your career. What did, how did you wind up being your senior developer advocate? A postman?

Wow. Uh, yeah. So I have a fairly winded and, uh, non-traditional way of getting into tech.

So I worked in the movie industry, uh, for 10 years, built sets, uh, out of college, uh, did transportation logistics. And then eventually my best friend, uh, he was a developer, and he is like, look, you've got an eye knack for this. You should look into it.

I ended up going to a dev bootcamp back in, this was 20, uh, 2016, got into tech, and I spent, uh, quite a few years as a developer. Went from junior engineer all the way up to senior, eventually became a tech lead that led me into, uh, engineering management. And I came here at To Postman as an engineering manager.

And eventually I started doing more and more stuff online. And then Marketing King said, Hey, we like what you're doing. Why don't you give a shot at, uh, being a senior developer advocate?

And now this is what I get to do. I get to talk to the developer community, uh, explain, you know, you know, talk to, talk to 'em about tough, uh, problems and problems we're facing, and kind of try to be a thought leader in this, in this space. I love it.

Good stuff. That's a great story, man. So, Sterling, I don't want to, you know, say anything outta school, but there are people out here who don't know who Postman is.

You know, if you had to explain it to him, what, what, what's Postman? What do you guys do? In one sentence, I could say the postman is, uh, the API collaborators, or it's a way to collaborate when you're building APIs.

It's a platform for building APIs. That said, it is significantly larger than that. We have a massively large suite of tools that are gonna help developers in every step of the way, whether they're, you know, building an API from the ground up.

So using, you know, the various specs to deploying, uh, your APIs, to also mocking your cert, mocking your APIs, testing them, uh, and everything in between. And now with the, the advent of ai, we now have a new suite of tools, uh, that we're calling the AI agent, uh, builder suite of tools. And this is, these are a set of tools that are specifically designed to help developers build AI agents.

Um, whether they're learning and or testing out an API or an AI for the first time, or they're actually building, uh, agents themselves and integrating with their own services and third party APIs. Fair enough. You know, I, I first became aware of Postman a number of years ago, so you guys have done a great job, right?

As you know, we live in the API economy, 57% or something like that, of all the traffic on the internet is actually API to api I kind of traffic. So it is, you know, there's a big market, as the VCs like to say, it's a big market. And, you know, helping facilitate that is, is a, is a major job.

Now, everything is AI today, right? And now in 2025, more than just where last year was more generative ai. This year we're talking agentic ai, AI agents will do everything for us.

We'll have all these alter egos running around, and we'll need an agent orchestrator, an AI orchestrator, or orchestrate our AI agents. But how do they actually communicate and do things probably via API, right? They'll, they'll be talking to ais and what's the difference between an AI agent and an API?

We could debate that, but you know, unfortunately, there's so much. Maybe fortunately, unfortunately, there's so much hype and there's so much nonsense out there. You know, AI agents are going to replace developers.

Uh, Zuckerberg says it may replace mid-level developers. Bezo says it may replace low-level developers. I don't know what, you know, the next oligarch says, but they're all looking to cut developers and use agents.

Other people say, Hey, don't believe that hype. This will be your best friend and it's gonna make you 10 XA developer than you are. Now.

Tell us, you know, what's your take on this and why, why do you think you're right? Oh, man. Well, there, there are a few things to that you, that you talked about there that I think we could unpack.

One is, go ahead. I, I, I've, I've talked about this a lot. I, um, that you can't do AI without quality APIs.

So one of the things that you, you mentioned earlier in this is there's like, AI is reliant on APIs to actually become ag agentic. You know, generative AI with last year was great, but that's nothing more than having a massively large encyclopedia that can kind of plan and be prepared to, or can, can create, uh, new content for you. But in the era of a agentic ai, this is where the rubber meets the road.

When it, when in my belief, you're gonna have APIs that are going to pass you information to another ai, and that AI is gonna then take action on your behalf. Now, to get to your big question, which is, are AI or agents going to going to replace us? Yes.

However, I want to be a big caveat on that. I believe that AI is not going to replace us. It's as much as it's going to replace a lot of the menial tasks that we didn't want to do to begin with.

Right? I, you know, I, when I was a developer, the last thing I did, the last thing I wanted to do was write tests. I hated, I was so bad.

My, my senior engineers, uh, I, I regret, well, knew one of the senior engineers that was a senior when I was a junior. Uh, and listening to this, I apologize right now, like the edge case testing, all of that was so difficult for me to wrap my head around and, and I shipped more bugs as a junior and mid-level engineer in the future. And what I, and where I think we're gonna be getting to is we're going to empower junior and mid-level engineers to be 10 to a hundred X better than what they are now, and solve a lot of those menial tasks, those problems that we don't want to solve on our, or we don't want to do ourselves.

So it's less about actually replacing us. It's going to replace portions of us and allow us to do what we do best, which is being creative. You know, why, why, the reason I got into developing, and it's not a huge transition from my background in, uh, set construction, and that is because I'm a builder at heart, and it's something that is just, it's innate in us.

We want to build things. And so being able to remove the, that remove some of those, those roadblocks of building is gonna be something that agent agentic AI is going to take, is gonna replace for us. Okay.

Um, what about the testers though? Are we gonna replace testers with agents? I don't think so.

I I think we're gonna empower testers to be even stronger in being, being better, right? Uh, when I was, you know, one of the last companies I was working for, we had a amazing QA team, and we used puppeteer to, you know, do some end to end testing. What we're gonna see with like, the likes of a, of operator or, uh, other ag agentic or other computer use is that a, a qa who's is, who's going to, who's going to use these tools, are going to be able to immediately come up with the, here's the work, here's the user flow through the my and the user journey through my app, and it's just gonna be able to write the test and then do that over and over and over again.

And then test it multiple in, in various forms. So, again, I don't think we're gonna be getting rid of them. I mean, every, every large company has hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of engineering jobs still available.

It's gonna help startups grow faster, and it's gonna help large companies, uh, fill some of those gaps where we don't have engineers right now. I think the, the last, the last census was that we've got around four 40 million to 42 million developers in the world. I Don't, that's GitHub accounts, I think.

Okay. Actual real developers, about 27 million is the latest number I saw. Yeah.

So if we're looking at 27 million, we have a lot more software to build, and so we're gonna need to empower those engineers to do more. So let me, let me flip that on you. Okay.

Right. Another thing, another numbers I've heard is, well, with AI doing coding for us, we're gonna go within the next seven to eight years, from 27 million, call it 30 million developers to 500 million developers. Because everyone becomes a developer when you don't have to code, when the AI's doing your code and another AI checks it and tests it for you, and another ai, you know, publishes it for you.

Everybody's a developer and well, that's a great, what does that mean for the world? Oh, I, I think we're gonna have to face that fact. Uh, and I don't know what totally what that means, but let me give you a really great example.

My sister is starting a cottage bakery and mm-hmm. She pinged me. She's like, Hey, Sterling, you, can you make me a website?

She doesn't know how to make a website. And all I did was I, I got on a call with her, had her explain, you know, the color palette, what she was looking for, um, and, you know, kind of like the vibe of, of the, of the website. And I said, who's your, who's your customer gonna be both, and what's the goal?

Right? 7 was released, Came out. Yeah.

I just, I put that in and it spit out a website and within 30 minutes I was shipping a next JS app for her. Now I'm the middleman. And for her to be able to go in and describe what she wants and then iterate on that, absolutely.

Like this, I think what AI is really going to be good at is democratizing technology. It's gonna make small business owners who are interested in getting into tech, it's gonna make, it's gonna empower them, and it's not gonna be a cost, uh, you know, cost prohibitive. On the other hand, large, large scale organizations, enterprises are going to be able to do a hundred x of what they were, what they could even write, like what they could even dream of.

You know, they thought, well, 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even three years ago, these weren't possible. Now it's all possible. Uh, and it, it's gonna be really, really amazing to see what happens.

I, I don't, I don't, I agree with you a hundred percent. I I think what's gonna happen though, Sterling is like that use case you just said with your sister. Your sister becomes a developer, she'll develop her own site.

'cause once she sees what you did, it's not going to be very long. Or she could go on to Claude herself and do it. Right?

And, and there you go. You're out of your job, out of your job with your sister, right? But, um, you're no longer the middleman and there go your cookies.

But beyond that, you know, that does free up quote unquote, you know, professional developers to do things maybe that aren't that easy, that aren't just, you know, quickly typed in those, A prompt and off you go. And, you know, and then there's, it's one thing to say, here's your website. It's another thing to say, okay, go deploy that I, I'm using GoDaddy host thing.

Go put it up on my servers and, and, uh, oh, and get the domain for me too, right? While you're there. That's what AI agents promise, right?

It's that mm-hmm. Okay, here's, here's this code I did for you. I want you to go use it and I want you to go deploy it.

I want, right? And that, at, at a company level, think about that, right? Hey, I just finished this app, run it through a genti AI testing, put it in my CICD pipeline, and if, and if the parameters are all there, let it go.

Well, I think when, especially when you're in a large, when you're in a large enterprise and you've got sometimes dozens of branches all trying to ship at the same time, I mean, we have, you know, we have these, these these dev teams who their only job is to look at deployment and can, and make sure all the branches that are coming from all the other, all the other teams are all working together with an agent that can do a lot of that, that's gonna free up those teams. We're gonna be able to ship 10 XA hundred x more. You know, imagine instead of, you know, these, these Fortune 500 companies that have, you know, sometimes tens of thousands of developers, they're gonna ship not weekly, not, you know, monthly or not quarterly.

They're gonna ship daily and 10 XA day, man. Yeah. It, John John said with DevOps, 10 x.

Yep. It, and it is gonna be interesting to see with DevOps, I, again, I don't think this is gonna replace anyone in DevOps, but it, but I think something that, uh, there was a podcaster, I can't remember what he, um, his name, I was just listening to it the other day. He said, in reality, we're gonna become managers of agents.

And that might be what it is. It's still that we need to know how to write code. We still need to know how to, how to ship code, how to deploy it, how to do all of that.

We may just be managing these large scales or, or large teams of, or armies as someone else put it, of s of, of agents. Clone Wars. Yep.

Well, so I got some thoughts on, so you're talking to someone who's from a generation where you aren't allowed to bring calculators into the test with you. Right? You had to know the math.

Now, today, you're allowed to bring your calculators into the test. A lot of kids can't do math without a calculator anymore. They can't read cursive writing.

'cause we don't do that anymore. Does all of these AI coding task, does it quickly turn to maybe not first gen, second gen managers of them no longer have, have that ability to code because the agents do it so Well, we don't have to worry about that. I just gotta worry about how to manage 'em better.

We may get to that point. I mean, I know Sam Aman said that, you know, 2035 is gonna look completely different than it is today. What that future holds, I, I don't know.

I maybe it might be that second gen managers who are doing this are going to have, are not gonna have as much code underneath them. At the same time, it just like any other innovation, any other, any other time in our, in our history, whether it's, you know, horse and buggy to cars, whether it's, you know, the first flight to jet engines, to rockets, everything is just, uh, an iteration. We'll, we will find new jobs, we'll find new ways of doing more.

It might be that we are no longer coding. I don't know. We'll see.

But what I do know is for the, for the short term future, which is I think two to three years, I think we're going to, I think we will continue tore, like, we'll, we'll continue to see what this path holds. I have faith in the developer community that take the right path. So, All right.

You know, let me bring this full circle as we end it. Maybe what we're headed for as a Star Trek universe, where humans just do what they feel like doing and, you know, and, and contributing to society. We don't worry about money, jobs, or coding.

Uh, you know what, that's as, as a huge longtime trekky. It's something that I have actually thought of is like the utopian Star Trek. Mm-hmm.

You know, instead of, we, instead of going down the terminator route where, you know, we've got, you know, robots with that are AI that are killing us, maybe we go down the Utopian Star Trek route where we have, we've overcome the need and the necessity for money. But I don't know, that's, I think those are, those are things that we'll have to face in the next, well, 10 to 20 years. Live long and prosper, dude.

Alright, Sterling, thanks very much for coming on Text Drug tv. This was a great conversation. Postman, what's the website?

com. Check it out. Sterling Chin, senior Developer Advocate Postman here on Tech Trunk tv.

We'll take a break. We'll be back in a moment.