Why developer portals matter more in the age of AI agents

There’s a growing narrative in the platform engineering community that internal developer portals (IDPs) are “dead.” That AI models are so good now, developers don’t need a portal to find things, scaffold projects, or understand their environment. That agents like Cursor, Claude, and GitHub Copilot have made the “alt-tab to a portal” workflow obsolete.I get the appeal of that argument. It’s clean, it’s provocative, and it contains a kernel of truth. But it also misses something fundamental about why developer portals exist in the first place—and why the agentic era makes them more im