Please ship APIs, not AI
Please expose your company’s core functionality via a well-considered API. Me and my agent will appreciate it greatly.
By well-considered, I mean for agents. Please consider token efficiency, fine-grained permissions, human-in-the-loop hooks, easy discovery, usage in skills, and so on when designing this API.
Please do this instead of (or in parallel to) building a product-specific AI agent.
Please do this despite the fact that it might pose an existential threat to your company. I know it might hurt to sink beneath the maw of as just another lowly agent infrastructure provider, but there is greatness in infrastructure. It’s hard and necessary.
Please do this because my agent is only as good as its tools. I want to use my agent for more, and more is often locked up behind UIs. Computer use is working these days, but it’s slow. Please let me skip all that and just use your API.
Please do this, and leap ahead to the next frontier, whatever that is to you. Feel free to give me outcomes instead of dashboards and all that. Whatever it is, I’ll hear you out. But please ship an API first.