There is a lot of speculation right now out there about what artificial intelligence means for APIs. People love saying there is no AI without API. Which is true. However most of the crystal balling done by the API crystal ballers are just looking at the technical details, as well as the business details from their own perspective selling API solutions. My crystal ball tells me that APIs will indeed be left behind because of artificial intelligence. Let me explain…
APIs won’t go away. They will actually become even more important. But nobody will want to talk about them. Investors won’t prioritize. Business leaders won’t want to do the work to understand why APIs matter after they had such a solid dose of AI smoke blown up their ass. They got a serious rush from the labor abstraction promises of artificial intelligence, they will never ever see straight up API automation in the same way. The AI hype train has revealed just how craven leadership is for easy solutions to the pesky human problems that plague their enterprise operations. You can’t put that cat back in the bag.
As I said in a previous post, the AI theater production needs people using applications, which will use APIs, but you won’t be able to talk about them as freely as we have before. AI provides a powerful abstraction solution for producing financial derivatives that conceal extraction, incompetency, and straight up theft. APIs will still be there, but when you look for them in the AI funhouse mirror you won’t be able to see them or coherently have a conversation about them. You can see what I mean by this mirror in the entropy that has emerged around two words: OpenAPI and OpenAI. You can’t search for OpenAPI anymore and people are removing the word from their portals to reduce confusion. Entropy.
Enterprises are still going to need APIs. They just won’t buy the public API product version we’ve all been peddling for the last fifteen years. If public at all, portals will be reduced to GitHub repos. When massive volume is needed, HTTP APIs will be replaced with gRPC, but most will just remain as HTTP JSON API vomit spreading as far as the eye can see. You won’t need governed or well-designed APIs. You don’t need a plan. You just poke a hole in any system you need to suck the guts out for your LLM or tap into as part of some agent. You will still need many, many, many APIs behind the applications all your low paid workers will be using, but they don’t have to be good.
Now, with all of that said. There will still be some people out there who care. I am primarily speaking of the US landscape. There will still be businesses who want to do the right thing. There will still be API work. All I am saying is that the whole API hustle we’ve all known will be left behind because of AI. There will still be work for many of us in space, but the crazy stupid big money and labor machinations will dominate over any sensible and logical desire to pull back the curtains on this production. AI has made that clear.
