DOP 343: Your APIs Were Never Built to Be the Front Door

#343: Here’s the thing about your company’s APIs – they were built for your own engineers to use inside your own software. Nobody designed them to be the front door. But that’s exactly what’s happening. Matt DeBergalis, CEO of Apollo GraphQL, makes a pretty compelling case that AI agents are turning internal APIs into the actual interface between companies and customers. Not the website. The APIs themselves.

And most of them aren’t ready for that. At all.

Think about what happens when you point a model at a typical REST API. GitHub’s API returns hundreds of fields for a single repository object. Fine when another service is calling it. But a model? All those extra fields are context you’re paying for, and they make the model hallucinate. Matt says you need something between the model and all those backend services – an orchestration layer that takes one request and handles the mess underneath. That’s where GraphQL comes in.

He draws a parallel that’ll land immediately if you’ve been in this space a while. APIs right now are pets – handwritten, named, carefully managed. But AI-generated code is about to produce way more microservices, which means way more APIs. They’re going to become cattle. And just like containers needed Kubernetes, APIs are going to need declarative infrastructure to manage them at scale.

The conversation takes an interesting turn when Darin pushes back on the idea that developers are becoming architects. His take: we’re becoming product managers. Matt says both. Viktor throws in code reviewers. Matt’s own story backs it up – he codes more as CEO than he did as CTO, because AI handles the parts he never had time to learn. He doesn’t know modern React. Doesn’t need to.

One more thing that should make any tech company uncomfortable: if AI agents are how customers find you now, what happens to your docs-page-driven acquisition funnel? Apollo’s already made the shift – their first audience for documentation is the models, not the humans.