The History of Swagger and OpenAPI with Tony Tam

For this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast we sat down with Tony Tam, the creator of Swagger (now OpenAPI), to dig into the history of how it all began. Tony shares the late-night desperation moment at Wordnik in 2010 that led to a self-describing API endpoint, the origin of the Swagger name at an Apigee event with Zeke Anos and Marsh Gardner, and how the project evolved from code-first generation to spec-first server definitions. We talk through the open sourcing of Swagger, the IRC channel days, the pivotal moment when the project moved into the Linux Foundation as OpenAPI, and the spirited debates that shaped the spec. Tony also reflects on the two moments he realized OpenAPI would matter for AI — a Watson pizza demo and an early conversation with Greg Brockman at OpenAI — and why he believes none of the current AI ecosystem could exist without the foundation APIs laid. We close on whether OpenAPI is fading in the agent era (spoiler — it isn’t) and why structure and contracts still give even the smartest AIs the best chance at doing a good job.