We hired an agent. It onboarded like everyone else.

James "Hirsty" Hirst - Blog Post Header for article about self-managed AI Gateways

In 1935, the US Army held a fly-off to choose its next bomber. Boeing turned up with the Model 299. It was the clear favourite. Bigger, faster, carried more than anything else on the field. The contract was as good as signed. On the demo flight, it took off, climbed, stalled, and crashed in a […]

Potemkin’s villages

James "Hirsty" Hirst - Blog Post Header for article about self-managed AI Gateways

In 1787, Catherine the Great sailed down the Dnieper to inspect her new lands. Her minister, Grigory Potemkin, had a problem. The lands were a mess. Poor, empty, unimpressive. So he built fake villages along the riverbank. Painted facades. Happy “peasants” who were actually his own men. As the boat passed, he’d dismantle the village, […]

Everyone’s an MCP gateway now

James "Hirsty" Hirst - Blog Post Header for article about self-managed AI Gateways

Not every MCP Gateway is equal.
There is a significant difference between a plugin and native MCP support.
This blog walks through the implications.

AI agents need API gateways

James "Hirsty" Hirst - Blog Post Header for article about self-managed AI Gateways

I’ve had the same conversation repeatedly this month. Someone building an AI agent system, getting excited about MCP, connecting their agents to internal tools and then asking: “Wait, how do we rate limit this? How do we audit what the agents are calling? What happens if an agent goes rogue and starts hammering our internal […]

Implementing idempotency protection in API gateways

In financial services, reliability is expected—but networks fail, requests get lost, and duplicate payments happen. APIs help enforce idempotency, ensuring transactions remain consistent no matter how many times they’re sent. Learn why this principle is essential for secure, error-free payment processing