<p>This is a guest conversation episode of <strong>Ship It Weekly</strong>, separate from the weekly news recaps.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p></p><p><strong>Highlights</strong></p><p>• The difference between an internal developer platform and an internal developer portal</p><p>• The three common IDP problem areas: discoverability, automation, and guardrails</p><p>• Why discoverability is usually the first pain teams feel</p><p>• Why adoption is often more of a human problem than a technical one</p><p>• Catalog completeness vs team ownership</p><p>• Why a lot of teams should start with automation first</p><p>• Self-hosted Backstage vs SaaS tradeoffs: extensibility, control, lock-in, and time to value</p><p>• Why IDPs may move from dashboards to context delivery for humans and agents</p><p>• Why AI helps teams build faster, but does not solve the problem of building the right thing</p><p>• David’s advice for platform and DevEx teams: talk to your internal users first</p><p></p><p><strong>David’s links</strong></p><p>• LinkedIn: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidtuite/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidtuite/</a></p><p></p><p><strong>Roadie / Backstage</strong></p><p>• Roadie: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://roadie.io/">https://roadie.io/</a> </p><p>• Backstage: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://backstage.io/">https://backstage.io/</a></p><p></p><p><strong>Stuff mentioned</strong></p><p>• Workday </p><p>• Backstage </p><p>• GitHub </p><p>• GitLab </p><p>• Bitbucket </p><p>• Azure DevOps </p><p>• Argo CD </p><p>• LaunchDarkly </p><p>• CircleCI </p><p>• DORA metrics </p><p>• MCP-style context for agents</p><p></p><p><strong>Our links</strong></p><p>More episodes + show notes + links: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://shipitweekly.fm">https://shipitweekly.fm</a></p><p>On Call Brief: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://oncallbrief.com">https://oncallbrief.com</a></p>