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AI Glossary · Concepts

What is Webhook?

Webhook

A webhook is an HTTP request that one service sends automatically to a URL you register when an event happens, such as a payment succeeding or a file finishing processing. It lets systems, including AI agents, react to events as they occur instead of polling an API for changes.

Also known as: webhooks, HTTP callback

· Updated · Chain of Thought

AI Engineering

  • 8 episodes
  • 1 guest clip
  • 2 sources

When a customer pays, Stripe can send a webhook to your server: an HTTP POST with the payment details. Your code receives it and updates the order. The alternative is polling, asking the API “anything new?” every few seconds, which is slower and wasteful.

Receiving webhooks safely takes some care. Anyone can send a request to a public URL, so receivers verify a signature before trusting the payload. Deliveries can fail or arrive twice, so senders retry and receivers make handlers idempotent, meaning a repeated event doesn’t double-charge or double-ship. For agents, webhooks are a natural trigger: an incoming event such as a new support ticket or a finished build can start or resume a long-running agent without anyone watching a screen.

In episode 78 at 2:29, Svix CEO Tom Hacohen says that before the Standard Webhooks effort you couldn’t find two identical webhook implementations in the wild, and that narrowing that variation made integrations easier. Svix builds webhook infrastructure, helped create Standard Webhooks, and sponsors Season 4 of the show; Conor thanks the Svix team for sponsoring the season at 1:56.

Hear it from the guest

“Like, literally, I don't think you could have found two identical implementations of webhooks in the wild. And just by reducing that space, I think we made integrations easier again.”
Tom Hacohen, Svix EP 78 · around 2:29 · read the transcript
Watch on YouTube

Quotes lightly edited to remove filler words.

Sources

  • GitHub Docs: About webhooks — GitHub's documentation on webhooks: subscribe to events and GitHub sends an HTTP request with a payload to a registered URL, as an alternative to polling the API; checked October 24, 2026.
  • Standard Webhooks specification — An open specification co-created by Svix and industry partners, covering payload format, signatures for verification and retry behavior; checked October 25, 2026.

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