There is a lot of celebration and discussion around AI agents using applications with the recent OpenAI Operator release, and speculation throughout the API community about what this means for APIs. If I am wearing my API Evangelist hat, I’d make similar arguments that the web applications these agents are using are all using APIs, and that the OpenAI Agent also is available as an API, so us API people are safe. Right? Right? Right?
However, this blog post is on Kin Lane. This isn’t an API Evangelist fairy tale. Kin Lane really doesn’t care about APIs, and they don’t need me defending them. Like most things with AI, agents using apps are a funhouse of mirrors. Any sufficiently intelligent AI that can use a web or mobile application can also use that application and reverse engineer the authentication and APIs behind those applications. There is no reason for AI to use applications, they should just cut out the middleman and go directly to the source if they are so smart.
So, why do we still need applications? It is less about needing applications, and it is because you will still need people. We still need people to do all of the work in the cracks of what AI can’t do—-which is quite a bit. AI needs people to be in the performance, and play a role in the production. This is primarily black and brown people from the southern hemisphere right now, but that is shifting in this moment as companies are load testing a new demographics to see who bites. That would be you. We all get to be the mechanical turk which agents will need to monitor, surveil and have step in whenever a human is needed to fix, verify, or complete the task, and write the playbook for tomorrow’s automation workflows.
Aye (AI) agents aren’t smart enough to create, find, and use all of the APIs (hint cause those were made by humans). AI agents need to automate on top of the application layer because it will ultimately need humans to do the work, connect the dots, and complete the illusion. Aye doesn’t concern me in all of this. It isn’t that smart. What concerns me is all of us white men are unable and unwilling to see the labor in all of this, and that we are doing the work to create the playbook for this next generation fascist future, and celebrating it like we all have a bright future at the table. Do you? Do we?
