An evolving idea I’m working through is that developer portals like Backstage and Port are becoming obsolete. They solved a real problem. Engineers needed one place to find services, templates, and docs. But a portal is just a website. It’s passive. It shows you things and gives you forms. The developer still has to leave their editor, open a browser, find the right page, and click through a workflow. That’s a lot of ceremony for someone who just wants to check who owns a service.

AI skills skip all of that. A skill connected to your service catalog via MCP can answer “what depends on the payments API?” without anyone opening a tab. A skill that knows your Terraform modules can scaffold infrastructure, apply your org’s naming conventions and compliance guardrails, and hand back real code. For new services, we still use cookiecutter templates to keep things deterministic. But the skill knows which template to use and how to run it.

Your engineers already live in their CLI. Meet them there.