This talk was presented at the AI The Docs 2025 online conference. We are thrilled to share the recording and the summary with you.
Visit the talk summary page to see all of the presentations from the conference.
Summary
How AI is reshaping web applications and developer portals? Will developer portals and documentation become obsolete, collapse into archives with an AI interface, or evolve into something new?
In his keynote presentation, Kristof Van Tomme (CEO of Pronovix) introduces three concepts:
- Tools: Self contained artifacts that can be brought into your work context (like a knife, APIs or agents integrated into workflows).
- Spaces: Immersive artifact systems that create a work context (like a kitchen, web or mobile apps).
- Affordances: Describe what a user can do with a tool or a system. Users can discover new affordances through interaction and adaptation.
Tools and spaces change our behaviour by changing our context. Tools can also become spaces: digital tools absorb our attention and become virtual (immersive) spaces.
Documentation portals can be seen as tyrannical spaces: not spaces by choice but necessity. Different personas have different needs: business users typically don’t mind using a Content Management System (CMS) for authoring, technical users prefer to work in their IDEs and push documentation automatically through CI/CD pipelines.
Kristof argues that APIs and agents are shifting applications from “spaces by necessity” toward flexible tools that reduce context switching. Value will increasingly come from affordances (how users repurpose tools) making documentation critical not only for features but for enabling discovery.
The future of developer portals lies in supporting AI-driven search, improving navigation, and rethinking user journeys to align tools and spaces with business value.
These ideas build on Alicia Juarrero’s Context Changes Everything and Marc Burgauer’s work on complexity.
Sign up to our Developer Portal Newsletter so that you never miss out on the latest API The Docs recaps and our devportal, API documentation and Developer Experience research publications.
