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I love people waking up to the importance of APIs. I have to work hard not diminish people’s excitement for each wave of “application” of the value in which APIs deliver. People get very attached to each application wave, because it is what they can see, and it is often what they can see because it is what is being invested in. The web (Facebook). The cloud (AWS). The mobile app (Instagram). The device application (Nest). The artificial Intelligence (Wolfram Alpha/Watson). The bots (Twitter/Slack). The single page app (React). The artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). The agents (Anthropic). People get really excited about the value that APIs bring, and the incremental improvements to the API toolbox (Graphs, Events, Cards, Capabilities, Prompts, etc) that come with wave of investment. For me, I see the pipes behind, and I have been advocating for a balance of the machine-readable and human-readable bits ever since 2010.
There is a lot of excitement about “agents” right now, and without diminishing people’s excitement, I want to point out that “agents” have been part of the web, and the API evolution all along. We all have “user-agents” in our browsers. We spend years doing the work and negotiating around the hypermedia needed to automate agentic activity. We worked to make it easy for “humans” to define the semantics around the data we depend on for automation, to make it easy for the agents to have the information they need around all of our digital resources. I spent a year convincing the top 25 cabinet level agencies to put machine-readable inventory of their public data assets, like Health and Human Services and Commerce–despite having {data.gov](https://data.gov/) for the humans. I’ve had a machine readable index to put into the root of your website or portal for over a decade now—with work to translate your human-readable plans, pricing, rate limits, and licensing into the machine-readable bits that the agents will need to onboard and negotiate with minimal human involvement. I have worked with many SaaS providers on their plans and pricing, only to have their investors deprioritize the automation. This is the API work – to make all of this machine-readable.
Everything we are talking about is out there already. Hypermedia is alive and well and used on numerous platforms. All those “cards” you see on Google search, and all those job postings I am harvesting for Naftiko Signals—those are JSON-LD providing the context needed for bots. Ya’ll are already doing this stuff, but just haven’t prioritized and invested in it across your operations. Mulesoft asked me to craft a API economy market rating system for the bots to understand the quality of images, videos, messages, payments, and other APIs, and they never quite prioritized it, leaving me to just publish it on the blog in search of another investor who had their priorities straight. EVERYTHING being showcased as part of GenAI, RAG, Agents, and the latest hype cycle is already being worked on as part of the existing API economy–they are just A/B testing new vocabulary paradigns. I don’t say this to diminish anyone’s excitement and enthusiasm, I say it to help you see the hype and emotional investment gaslighting that is being pumped into the room around us all. I’m used to it, and I am just looking for new ways to help people see it.
No, API portals weren’t made for humans. They were made for agents and bots. SaaS companies didn’t prioritize REST (real REST), Hypermedia, Semantics, and API design-first—they chose to move fast and break things with the “applications” that are easier to see than the pipes behind the curtain. SaaS providers and investors opted to create walled gardens and not invest in the original vision of the web—because of their investor playbooks. What you are hearing about “agentic” is just the latest wave of financialization of everything around us, creating another set of constructs to bet on and short. When I see folks declare that everything we know in the last financialization construct is rendered meaningless because of the latest finanicalization construct, I know it is true. Because they deem it so, and thus everyone believes. This is why we are investing in agentic at Naftiko, by continuing to do the work on the Web, APIs, and machine and human readable standards across all of the digital resources we’ve all been investing in for years. Because this isn’t a new game, but in a world where everyone is looking for an easy button, and we collectively forget our past, there is a lot of fresh money to be made off each wave of stories and emotion around using new words to describe what already exists.
It all makes phrases like this “Sequoia is telling you the entire distribution layer is being rewritten. The question is whether your product is optimized for human attention or machine parsing. Most are built for the wrong audience.” pretty catchy, and feel like something amazing is afoot. Where for me, this has been business as usually since 2010. It is what Obama brought me to Washington DC in 2013 to do. It is what I do, as described by Tyler Singletary over a decade go, when he wrote - Untangling The Politics of APIs. What Sequoia is doing here with their “agent-led growth” claim, is reshuffling the words we use to describe the technical details as part of the alpha investors shifting the business playbook of the game, which will be dictated by a new set of political rules that are being automated (for good or bad). My goal, as it has always been as the API Evangelist is to make sure I am aware of the interface technology while staying at the edge of the application technology quagmires, staying tuned into the business playbook on the table for the moment, and being as tuned as I can into the politics being played, so that I don’t get played at the technological or business levels like may people do. This is what we are building at Naftiko, to help companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies sensibly leverage their existing internal and 3rd-party infrastructure to navigate not just this wave, but every future wave confidently–no matter what playbook is on the table.
youtu.be/MFsYaRnrcPQ?… yessss
A Type-Safe, Purely Functional Effect System for Asynchronous and Concurrent F#
