There is a lot of history present in my new tattoo, but the urgency by which I needed to draw that blood can be seen through my Marvelesque lens of the API universe. Clearly this isn’t an API Evangelist story, which is why it’s here on Kin Lane, so my apologies in advance for the API blah blah blah bleeding over here. Anyways. Let me try to explain my tattoo in the context of what I am seeing happening right now.
First, you have to understand that I see APIs like I see Sentinels from the Matrix. If you want to know more you can read Sentinel APIs, but in short, Sentinels began as worker bots and then later turned evil to be what we saw in the first Matrix movie. We are entering this phase with APIs.
Another history that is helpful to understand my thinking is that for the last fifteen years we have made forward momentum in convincing enterprise organizations that it is a good thing to publish an API portal publicly and make some of their valuable digital resources available to the world. This is all changing in the age of Aye (AI), and if you want to understand two ends of the spectrum up for grabs at this moment you can read these two posts.
- Trend 3 API consumption - API Economy Trends for 2025
- The New New Moats, Why Systems of Intelligence are still the next defensible business model
In my Marvelesque API Universe these are the opposite forces for good and evil. Mark Boyd’s vision for the API economy against Greylock’s Sauron-like vision for the future. Dammit, I am mixing up my universes too much huh? Focus. Ok, anyways. Clearly I am team Mark Boyd, but full disclosure Mark pays me millions of dollars annually to better understand how the machine works (not really), so he is out there being one of the faces of the API economy, while I operate in the shadows within the enterprise governance machine. It is my job to understand the threat and get a feeling for which direction the narrative wind is blowing.
There is a lot at stake right now. Clearly my tattoo sets the tone of things. But to help better understand the shift happening right now when it comes to the demise of APIs as we’ve been peddling and hustling them for the last fifteen years. Open ecosystems with APIs are beginning to reverse the flow at scale to protect from Aye harvesting. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others are tightening down their APIs and making deals to license their data with Aye. Ironically, having a strong business model that is API-first is how you defend against Aye fuckery, just like you would for any other application. Shit is just way more weaponized now and it will be just a full on Ayessault on our API portals (and websites) from here forward.
So what do you do at this moment? Well, when the Sentinels workers who have been your buddies up until now begin working with the Aye agents and starting shifting their allegiance you don’t want to become a target so you begin to speak like them, use the same language, and obsequiously tell stories about how amazing Aye agents are, and what a natural fit they are for APIs. It is just what you have to do to say alive.
The sale for an API portal has always been a hard one. Executive leadership rarely understands the authentication, encryption, rate limiting, role-based access control, rules, validation, transformations, logging, alerting, reporting, and many other layers in place with your average public API portal and gateways—-so they always think you are giving away the farm, even when you aren’t. Maybe the argument for API portals will become easier in a time of Aye, or maybe the need for API portals are going to go away entirely. Maybe all you need is just a GitHub repository? IDK, only time will tell.
But back to my Marvelesque API universe. This is why I depend on each of the rolling cast of characters hustling API ecosystems portals as part of the API universe. Instead of boring developer.domain.com, think of it more like Marvel’s Doctor Strange. I depend on an eclectic band of misfits to produce many different types of portals with the mix of colors and ingredients I outlined above. People like…
- Claire Barrett of APIsFirst
- Mark Boyd of Platformable
- ristof van Tomme of Provonix
- Adeel Ali of APIMATIC
- Marc Laventure of Scalar
- Sébastien Charrier of Bump.sh
- Dave Shanley of Princess Heavy Beef
- Allan Knabe of Amiable
Ok, now picture all of them standing in a room each making small, medium, and large portals and ecosystems with their hands. Ok, now picture them all struggling to keep all of their portals open when Greylock is Ayessaulting all of their customer’s API portals distilling down some defensible intelligence within Greylock’s moat, so that they can capture all of the value in the universe. I depend on this ragtag band of people to fight the good fight to keep the API ecosystem and portal dream alive.
Ok, so I’ve really crossed the streams here. I have Lord of the Rings, Marvel Universe, and the Matrix all rolled up into my analogy for the API universe.
Ultimately I am unsure whether we’ll be able to keep selling the concept of an API portal to executive leadership that has simultaneously been sold the Aye vision. I wanna believe that they will want to logically secure their digital resources and capabilities using an API gateway with unbundled portal, docs, explorer, playgrounds, clients, and more. It was all a tough sell under the austerity imposed by engineering and IT budgets, but I am just not convinced within a full on Aye World War that executive leaders are going to care about the nuance of making digital resources available via the web. They will just poke a random HTTP hole in the enterprise firewall and wish for the best. They will just lay a gRPC pipeline and get the value flowing. They won’t have time for design-first and other touchy feely ecosystem stuff.
Ahhhhhh. Ok. Breathe.
My role is to a) not be ground into sausage by the machine, and b) do not become too cynical and jaded. So, how do we find a collective narrative that will work in these times? How do we keep the digital resources flowing? How do we equip the humans on the ground floor doing the work to keep their jobs, succeed in their work, and not lose their souls.
First, we have to remember, APIs are not our friends. The people we produce and consume APIs with can be our friends. The people we buy and sell API services with can be our friends. The people who invest money into our API tools and services can be our friends. Bwaahaha. OK, maybe not that far. But the point is, humans can be our friends. The APIs, agents, and the corporations they serve will never be our friends. Please don’t be fooled ever into thinking APIs are good, or agents are good. They aren’t. They are neither good, nor bad, nor neutral. They are a tool. Only humans matter, and ideally humans doing things together as a community or ecosystem.
So, are we going to need API portals if we are going to use Aye agents? Probably not. However, if we aren’t going to use AI agents, we most definitely will need them as shields. Honestly, API portals are just websites. We will need websites and portals operating within our own domains to keep the original vision of the web alive. We can’t let the Ayessault on our humanity, as well as our digital resources and capabilities via our own domains, take us offline or push us entirely behind paywalls. That is what they want. API portals, plans, rate limits, and gateway is just a paywall for the value exchange around our valuable digital resources and capabilities. We are going to still need this in the age of Aye, and in this time of the great Aye wars. As I’ve said before, not much has changed with APIs, but the polarities are flipping with the web, or maybe these forces were always there and we couldn’t see them, regardless shit is different right now, and lines are being drawn.
