(And we know that because there was a brief period in time where basics of spreadsheets and databases were part of curriculum in the West and people had no problem with that.)
Previously, many companies gated these APIs but with the MCP AI hype they are incentivized to expose what you can achieve with APIs through an agent service.
Incentives align here: user wants automations on data and actions on a service they are already using, company wants AI marketing, USP in automation features and still gets to control the output of the agent.
Why would they be incentivized to do that if they survived all the previous hype waves and still have access gated?
> user wants automations on data and actions on a service they are already using,
How many users want that? Why didn't companies do all this before, since the need for automation has always been there?
Because they suddenly now don't want to be left out of the whole AI hype/wave.
Is it stupid? Yes. Can we still reap the benefits of these choices driven by stupid motivations? Also yes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44405491 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44408434
IFTTT was announced Dec. 14, 2010 and launched on Sept. 7. 2011.
Zapier was first pitched Sept. 30, 2011 and their public beta launched May 2012.
Do we really not having anything coming close to the usefulness of Yahoo Pipes yet? What would a modern alternative look like and how would it work? Someone has to thinking about this.
> Do we really not having anything coming close to the usefulness of Yahoo Pipes yet?
I don't know of anything. There's some new products I saw heavily promoted on LinkedIn, but at first glance they feel like IFTTT with a shiny coat of paint.
> What would a modern alternative look like and how would it work?
At this point I think ComfyUI or the node editor in Blender would be the best; they're oriented for different kinds of workflows, but UIs of both are excellent in their own ways, and the rest is a matter of implementing the right blocks.