# Built Capstead: A Governance & Observability Layer on Top of Spring AI — Looking for Feedback

[satya-anguluri]

Hi Spring AI community,

Over the past few months, I've been building an open-source project called Capstead that sits on top of Spring AI. I'd really appreciate feedback from people building AI-enabled Spring applications.

As applications start exposing multiple AI capabilities (chat, summarization, RAG, document extraction, classification, etc.), I found it increasingly difficult to answer questions like:

• Which AI capabilities does this service expose?
• Which team owns each capability?
• Which capabilities are the most expensive?
• Which capabilities are failing or exceeding latency budgets?
• How do I discover AI capabilities across multiple Spring Boot services?

Spring AI already provides excellent abstractions, provider integrations, and model-level observability. Capstead adds a governance layer centered around business capabilities rather than individual model calls.

The current prototype provides:

• A live capability catalog
• Per-capability metrics (latency, success rate, token usage, and cost)
• Daily budget enforcement
• Durable execution history with parent/child execution trees
• Capability discovery using a simple @Capability annotation (or a bodyless @CapabilityClient interface)
• MCP export so discovered capabilities can be exposed as agent tools
• Provider-neutral support (Spring AI, LangChain4j, custom SDKs, or any HTTP client)

My goal is to complement Spring AI, not compete with it.

I'd love feedback on a few architectural questions:

1. Is capability-level governance something you've needed in production?
2. Would you prefer annotation-based capability discovery, or a different approach?
3. Are there governance or observability features you feel are currently missing from the Spring AI ecosystem?
4. If you operate multiple Spring Boot services with AI features, how are you currently cataloging and governing those capabilities?

Project:
https://github.com/satya-anguluri/capstead

I'm actively evolving the project, so any feedback, critiques, feature ideas, or architectural suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
Attached is the image for demo purpose