The Second Wave of the API-first Economy — brandur.org
APIs were meant to make the web programmable and interoperable. A combination of revenue chasing, security concern, and abuse reversed the trend for a decade as walls went up instead of down. Today, LLMs are changing the equation. People want agents that act on their behalf, and the services that ship APIs will have a decisive edge over those that don't.
The Second Wave of the API-first Economy — brandur.org brandur.org Articles Atoms Fragments Newsletter Sequences Now Uses About Auto The Second Wave of the API-first Economy Article The Second Wave of the API-first Economy 🔗 Published Mar 27, 2026 Location Seattle I'm on X/Twitter at @brandur . Mar 27, 2026 The first wave API winter The coming second wave Picking my future bank Ubiquitous again On behalf of people Limits of the model Hints of the future, today API spring Fifteen years ago, when some colleagues and I were building Heroku's V3 API, we set an ambitious goal: the public API shoul
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