When API Clients Have a Mind of Their Own
Join me for O’Reilly Media’s “APIs and Agents” Superstream event Thursday, July 17, 2025.
There was a time, not so long ago, when designing an API meant naming things carefully, arguing over whether PUT or PATCH was more RESTful, and shipping something human-readable to go along with the working code. We worried about rate limits, pagination, and versioning. And our consumers? They were human too.
That’s all changed. Again.
Today’s API traffic is increasingly machine-generated. LLM-driven clients, autonomous agents, and scripted bots are probing your endpoints, parsing your payloads, and often failing to do anything useful. These new clients don’t read docs, don’t open tickets, and don’t care how elegant your URI structure is. But they’re here, and they’re not going away.
Superstream July 17
On July 17, I’ll be hosting the O’Reilly AI/API Superstream: APIs and Agents, a live, online event focused on the very real collision between how we build APIs — and how modern AI systems try to use them.
Who will be there
This Superstream brings together a sharp group of experts tackling the problem from different angles:
Zdenek Nemec (Superface.ai) opens with a challenge: Have we failed? He’ll explore why APIs have become bottlenecks for agents and what it means to design "AI-appropriate" interfaces in a world of LLM-powered consumers.
Martyn Davies (Zuplo) gets tactical, showing how to use your existing APIs and gateways to generate and secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers — turning your infrastructure into agent-friendly terrain without exposing yourself to common vulnerabilities.
Markus Mueller (Boomi) digs into the enterprise-grade side of things: federated governance, secure scalability, and agentic readiness for APIs that need to support mission-critical systems.
Manai Mohamed Mortadha (Netflix) brings the AI engineering perspective, exploring how LLMs, GenAI, and xAI systems are powered by APIs — and how smart design choices shape everything from personalization to transparency.
Julia Kasper (Microsoft) will show how to expose APIs as AI-ready tools using Azure API Management and MCP, enabling agents to act with autonomy and precision in complex environments.
Ryan Day rounds things out with a broader view of AI and API convergence, highlighting the skillsets and design approaches we’ll need to make these two disciplines play nicely together.
I’ll be moderating the day helping stitch together perspectives, flag the recurring challenges, and keep the focus on what we can do today to make our APIs more discoverable, available, and usable by clients that weren’t in the room when we drew up the API spec.
Here’s the underlying truth
AI-driven agents are incredibly good at paying attention (they see everything) but they lack context and judgment. And that’s something we can help them with, if we’re willing to revisit a few of our long-held assumptions.
Sign Up Now
Join me for O’Reilly Media’s “APIs and Agents” Superstream event Thursday, July 17, 2025. See full agenda + register here
See you there!