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Portal by Spotify

Portal by Spotify is Spotify's commercial, hosted evolution of Backstage — the Internal Developer Portal. On this wiki it appears for one feature: AiKA Modes, the mechanism behind Spotify's token-routing story for coding agents (Source: sources/2026-09-03-spotify-portal-by-spotify-cut-my-claude-code-token-usage-by-90).

AiKA Modes

A mode is a declarative agent that runs on an ephemeral runtime — the post's framing is "AWS Lambda, but for agents." You define:

  • instructions — the system prompt / behaviour;
  • model — any model configured in your Portal instance (Gemini 2.5 Flash in the published examples);
  • resourceLimits — e.g. temperature;
  • attached MCP tools (see MCP);
  • visibility — public (shared org-wide) or private.

Portal handles the rest: no infra to manage, no API keys, no long-running servers. Modes are callable from the Portal CLI or API. This makes a mode a unit of serverless compute for agents and a concrete instance of a declarative agent definition running on an ephemeral declarative agent runtime.

Name resolution (own-first)

Mode names resolve case-insensitively, preferring your own mode, then your team's, then public ones. Forking a public mode into a customised version means yours automatically takes precedence with no extra configuration — a lightweight override model for shared agent definitions.

The two reference modes

  • bulk-reader — "a precise code analyst": read the provided files and answer concisely, structured bullets only, no prose/preambles. Used to offload multi-file reads away from the frontier model.
  • code-writer — generate a code file from a spec + reference files, matching existing patterns exactly, code only. Used for tests, config scaffolding, and type stubs.

Both are public in AiKA, so they are reusable across projects and shareable across a team without re-creating them. They are the load-bearing piece of the routing story: the plugin decides when to delegate; the mode decides how to respond. Swap the worker model, change the prompt, or add MCP tools without touching the plugin.

Why it matters here

Portal/AiKA Modes turn model routing from a systems-engineering problem (build a proxy, manage credentials, run servers) into a configuration problem (describe an agent and name it). The routing enforcement is a separate client-side concern handled by shunt; the modes are the reusable, shareable, composable workers behind it. This is the same I/O-vs-reasoning split and dynamic model selection seen in proxy-based routers, but expressed as declarative ephemeral agents rather than a stateful gateway.

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