Ship It Conversations: David Tuite on Backstage, Internal Developer Portals, and the Shift to AI Agents

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.

In this Ship It: Conversations episode, I talk with David Chute, founder and CEO of Roadie, about internal developer portals, Backstage, automation, and how IDPs may evolve as AI agents become more common in engineering workflows.

We talk about the difference between a platform and a portal, the three common problems IDPs usually try to solve, why discoverability tends to be the first pain teams feel, and why a lot of orgs should start with automation before trying to perfect a service catalog. We also get into self-hosted Backstage vs managed options, and how teams should think about adoption, data models, and time to value.

The bigger theme is the one I found most interesting: IDPs may be shifting away from dashboard-heavy “single pane of glass” thinking and toward becoming context layers for workflows, terminals, and eventually agents.

Highlights

• The difference between an internal developer platform and an internal developer portal

• The three common IDP problem areas: discoverability, automation, and guardrails

• Why discoverability is usually the first pain teams feel

• Why adoption is often more of a human problem than a technical one

• Catalog completeness vs team ownership

• Why a lot of teams should start with automation first

• Self-hosted Backstage vs SaaS tradeoffs: extensibility, control, lock-in, and time to value

• Why IDPs may move from dashboards to context delivery for humans and agents

• Why AI helps teams build faster, but does not solve the problem of building the right thing

• David’s advice for platform and DevEx teams: talk to your internal users first

David’s links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidtuite/

Roadie / Backstage

• Roadie: https://roadie.io/

• Backstage: https://backstage.io/

Stuff mentioned

• Workday

• Backstage

• GitHub

• GitLab

• Bitbucket

• Azure DevOps

• Argo CD

• LaunchDarkly

• CircleCI

• DORA metrics

• MCP-style context for agents

Our links

More episodes + show notes + links: https://shipitweekly.fm

On Call Brief: https://oncallbrief.com