Developer-Experience

Introduction

Building a platform like Swoop means juggling a mobile app, dashboards, APIs, infrastructure, and — more recently — AI agents. Over time, I built a workflow using Claude Code that treats all of it as one intelligent workspace: a single place where code, data, operations, and testing are deeply connected.

The key insight: AI becomes genuinely useful when it shares your mental model of the system.

When architecture, tooling, and context are explicit, Claude stops acting like autocomplete and starts reasoning like a teammate who understands your entire environment. This isn’t about clever prompts — it’s about teaching your workspace to think in context.

At Quantum Metric, the concept of dog fooding, or using our own products to solve our problems, has been a cornerstone of our product development process.

Since the beginning of our journey with Backstage, our team has always valued a deeper understanding of user engagement and behavior on the platform. This approach has enabled us to leverage the power of our own product from the outset, offering us a window into both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the platform we are building. As our platform has grown and evolved, so has our commitment to refining the data that we capture.

At Quantum Metric, our teams committed to leveraging Backstage within our Developer Experience Platform (or DXP as we refer to it) following a brief but convincing POC. We felt confident in it becoming a critical component within our Platform moving forward.

We wanted to share our experiences in the early stages of integrating Backstage as well as give some examples for why we felt that it was important to build a strong foundation to support our System Model.