The real insight buried in here is "build what programmers love and everyone will follow." If every user has an agent that can write code against your product, your API docs become your actual product. That's a massive shift.
Using agents that interact with APIs represents people being able to own their user experience more. Why not craft a frontend that behaves exactly the the way YOU want it to, tailor made for YOUR work, abstracting the set of products you are using and focusing only on the actual relevant bits of the work you are doing? Maybe a downside might be that there is more explicit metering of use in these products instead of the per-user licensing that is common today. But the upside is there is so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.
OK, but: that's an economic situation.
> so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.
Right, so there's less profit in it.
To me it seems this will make the market more adversarial, not less. Increasing amounts of effort will be expended to prevent LLMs interacting with your software or web pages. Or in some cases exploit the user's agentic LLM to make a bad decision on their behalf.
it's basically SEO all over again but worse, because the attack surface is the user's own decision-making proxy. at least with google you could see the search results and decide yourself. when your agent just picks a vendor for you based on what it "found," the incentive to manipulate that process is enormous.
we're going to need something like a trust layer between agents and the services they interact with. otherwise it's just an arms race between agent-facing dark patterns and whatever defenses the model providers build in.
I mean, services _could_ make it harder to use LLMs to interact with them, but if agents are popular enough they might see customers start to revolt over it.
We're already seeing this with search. Ask an LLM "what tools do X" and the answer depends heavily on structured data, citation patterns, and how well your docs/content map to the LLM's training. Companies with great API docs but zero presence in the training data just won't exist to these agents.
So it's not just "API docs = product" -- it's more like "machine-legible presence = existence." Which is a weird new SEO-like discipline that barely has a name yet.