DOP 318: WireMock and the Changing Landscape of API Development Tools

Episode 318

Show Notes

#318: In this episode, we explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping the world of API development and testing with Tom Akehurst, CTO & Co-founder at WireMock. As AI agents become more prevalent in software development, the tools and practices around API design, testing, and maintenance are evolving rapidly. Tom shares insights on how WireMock is adapting to this new landscape and what it means for developers and organizations building distributed systems.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does WireMock actually mock?

Tom Akehurst clarifies on DevOps Paradox episode 318 that WireMock mocks networked APIs rather than objects. The core library is written in Java, but because the thing being mocked is a network interface, it works with any stack that speaks HTTP, whether REST or SOAP. The open source version can run as a standalone process configured over the network, so callers need not be Java developers.

Why mock at the network level instead of using mock objects?

Tom Akehurst points on DevOps Paradox episode 318 to an old rule among the originators of mock objects: do not mock types you do not own. HTTP clients are a particularly bad fit and produce brittle, misleading tests. Running your service almost exactly as it runs in production, with only the external endpoints redirected, catches configuration errors, serialiser problems and concurrency bugs that object mocking hides.

Is an LLM like a junior developer?

Tom Akehurst rejects the analogy on DevOps Paradox episode 318. The key difference is accumulation: knowledge you give a junior developer builds up until they can work autonomously, while a model needs first-month-on-the-job supervision permanently. Viktor Farcic pushes back that this assumes only one of the two improves, and Akehurst concedes the trajectories differ, with the human fitting themselves to your specific domain.

How do you keep an OpenAPI specification accurate?

Tom Akehurst recommends a closed feedback loop on DevOps Paradox episode 318: sample real traffic to and from the API, validate it against the description, and alert people automatically when the two diverge. He expects agents to take the next step by opening pull requests with suggested fixes, turning documentation maintenance into reviewing those rather than someone trawling through the spec field by field.

Does AI make API design more consistent?

Tom Akehurst argues on DevOps Paradox episode 318 that the homogenising effect is welcome here, since a model steers you toward whichever pagination or address structure is most common, which is what consumers already recognise. Viktor Farcic objects that public training data is not a quality signal, and that the most frequently used approach is not necessarily the right one, comparing it to a heavily upvoted but poor answer on a question site.

Does AI entrench established tools against new ones?

Viktor Farcic draws the distinction on DevOps Paradox episode 318: a search engine still shows a second, third and fourth result, and some people scroll. Ask a model to do something and there is no long tail at all. Tom Akehurst concedes the risk, likening the default behaviour to a search engine’s I’m Feeling Lucky button, and says investors he has spoken to rather like the advantage it gives incumbents.

What is the DevOps Paradox podcast?

DevOps Paradox is a weekly podcast co-hosted by Darin Pope and Viktor Farcic, covering DevOps, platform engineering, and modern software delivery. Episode 318 brings in Tom Akehurst, creator of WireMock, to discuss network-level API mocking, keeping specifications honest, and what AI agents are doing to API design and to tool discovery. Every episode page carries the audio, the video, and a full transcript.

Episode Transcript

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Guests

Tom Akehurst

Tom Akehurst

Tom has been a professional software developer for over 20 years. He’s built large-scale web systems for media, travel, hospitality, retail and government, applying lean, eXtreme Programming, Continuous Delivery and DevOps principles along the way.

Tom has always been interested in (or obsessed by, perhaps) networked system testing and automation, and as such he’s the creator of WireMock - the open source API mocking tool, which he’s now been working on for well over a decade.

Lately he’s also the CTO and co-founder of WireMock, Inc., where he’s helping complex engineering organisations effectively adopt API simulation techniques in order to build better software faster.

Hosts

Darin Pope

Darin Pope

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic is a member of the Google Developer Experts and Docker Captains groups, and published author.

His big passions are DevOps, Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices, Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment (CI/CD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD).

He often speaks at community gatherings and conferences.

He has published DevOps Paradox and Test-Driven Java Development.

His random thoughts and tutorials can be found in his blog The DevOps Toolkit.