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If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

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Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#21

Post by energy123 »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #14
datpuz wrote: post #4

AI agents can't even do very basic things without causing absolute mayhem. Do you really think it makes sense for your basic assumption to be that your user is dumber than a token generator?

YES 100%, and severely disabled too.

I legitimately wish developers of consumer apps would assume I am extremely stupid (and impatient).

I'll grant you your silly hamburger icon, I can memorize that one, if you grant me text icons for everything else, and low latency, and leave your ego and whatever you think you know about customers wanting to memorize 8 different icons for each app they use at the door.

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#22

Post by diggan »

Groxx wrote: post #8

Indeed, because the only things worth building are things you could give to a junior dev with little oversight. That's why programming salaries are so low and why nobody stays in the field after a couple years - it's too hard to make a living when you have to compete with people fresh out of training bootcamps.

> That's why programming salaries are so low

Lol, where you live/work? Almost everywhere you get paid more as a software developer than as a nurse (just one example), and the difference of impact on your health/sanity from both roles is huge.

I think people who never worked in anything else than software don't know how easy they have it.

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#23

Post by Zambyte »

energy123 wrote: post #21
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES 100%, and severely disabled too.

I legitimately wish developers of consumer apps would assume I am extremely stupid (and impatient). I'll grant you your silly hamburger icon, I can memorize that one, if you grant me text icons for everything else, and low latency, and leave your ego and whatever you think you know about customers wanting to memorize 8 different icons for each app they use at the door.

I wish developers of consumer applications wouldn't assume anything about me, and would let me use my computer to my whims of the moment.

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#24

Post by energy123 »

neves wrote: post #13

In one of my first uses of a LLM for helping me code, was to use a not popular Python library API. It completely hallucinated the API calls, but what was interesting is that the invented API was much more pythonic than the real one. It created a better API. Now I'm waiting for the change to use LLMs for creating an API for a package of mine. It will be averaged from all other apis and won't have unexpected calls.

> It completely hallucinated the API calls, but what was interesting is that the invented API was much more pythonic than the real one. It created a better API.

Something I realized when refactoring is it's easier to vibe refactor a codebase that was itself vibe coded because all the code is "in distribution". If I try to vibe refactor a codebase I wrote, it doesn't cohere with what it expects to see and hallucinates more.

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#25

Post by unshavedyak »

diggan wrote: post #22
Groxx wrote: post #8

Indeed, because the only things worth building are things you could give to a junior dev with little oversight. That's why programming salaries are so low and why nobody stays in the field after a couple years - it's too hard to make a living when you have to compete with people fresh out of training bootcamps.

> That's why programming salaries are so low Lol, where you live/work? Almost everywhere you get paid more as a software developer than as a nurse (just one example), and the difference of impact on your health/sanity from both roles is huge. I think people who never worked in anything else than software don't know how easy they have it.

I took their comments as sarcasm, fwiw.

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#26

Post by kurthr »

lesser23 wrote: post #18
pcwelder wrote: post #7

I believe this applies to all AI use cases to varying degrees. If AI can't use X, then there is something wrong with X. X in { website, codebase, function, language, library, mcp, ...}

“AI” can’t use X so we have to dumb it down to the point a next token predictor can figure it out. Every day it seems like we are using spicy autocomplete as a measure of understandability which seems entirely silly to me. My own employer has ascribed some sort of spiritual status to prompts. The difference between prompting an LLM and a seance with psychedelics is getting smaller and smaller. The next AI winter is g…

I don't know, man. I also find AI slop to be uncanny and strangely repulsive, but the other side is that, if there's not enough information in your API and documentation for an LLM, then there's a clever intern that will get it just exactly wrong.

The challenge with making things idiot proof is the ingenuity of idiots. Remember 50% of people are "bellow" median.

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#27

Post by RexySaxMan »

diggan wrote: post #22
Groxx wrote: post #8

Indeed, because the only things worth building are things you could give to a junior dev with little oversight. That's why programming salaries are so low and why nobody stays in the field after a couple years - it's too hard to make a living when you have to compete with people fresh out of training bootcamps.

> That's why programming salaries are so low Lol, where you live/work? Almost everywhere you get paid more as a software developer than as a nurse (just one example), and the difference of impact on your health/sanity from both roles is huge. I think people who never worked in anything else than software don't know how easy they have it.

They are being sarcastic.

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#28

Post by 98codes »

Groxx wrote: post #8

Indeed, because the only things worth building are things you could give to a junior dev with little oversight. That's why programming salaries are so low and why nobody stays in the field after a couple years - it's too hard to make a living when you have to compete with people fresh out of training bootcamps.

/s, presumably

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#29

Post by levkk »

blopker wrote: post #20

I get the feeling we're going to end up in a place where we don't make docs any more. A project will have a trusted agent that can see the actual code, maybe just the API surface, and that agent acts like a customer service rep to a user's agent. It will generate docs on the fly, with specific examples for the task needed. Maybe the agents will find bugs together and update the code too. Not exactly where I'd like to…

There are lots of things that neither the code nor the docs cover, so I suspect that's not quite possible, yet.

For example, if you're deploying a Postgres proxy, it will have a TCP timeout setting that you can tweak. Neither the docs nor the code will tell you what the value should be set to though.

Your engineers might know, because they have seen your internal network fail dozens of times and have a good intuition about it.

Software complexity has a wide range. If you're thinking of simple things like Sendgrid, Twilio or Stripe APIs, sure, an agent can easily write some boilerplate. But I think in certain sectors, we would need to attach some more inputs to the model that we currently don't have to get it to a good spot.

Re: If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users

#30

Post by exabrial »

We used to have things called WSDLs and XSD schemas that made it _extraordinarily_ easy to make remote calls. Granted, a bunch of ding dongs never loaded their own WSDL to look at it, creating a bad rap.

We do have:

* WADLs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Application_Description_La...

* JSON Schema:https://json-schema.org/learn/miscellaneous-examples

And when they are available they're incredible, but nobody uses them.

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