Every API Will Be Rebuilt for Agents

MCP solves the connection problem. It does not solve the verb gap.

You can wrap a perfect REST API in MCP in one afternoon. Even then, a coding agent will struggle. It will pick the wrong endpoint. It will call three tools when one is enough. It might perform a destructive write without asking.

The API is not broken. It is just built for the wrong consumer.

For twenty years, APIs were built for humans. Humans bring intent and a mental model. Agents bring neither. They must reconstruct both from your surface.

When the primary consumer changes this much, the interface must change too.

I believe serious product surfaces will not just wrap existing APIs. They will rebuild them around agent-native operations.

This means moving from resource-shaped APIs to intent-shaped contracts. We must redesign around goals, state, side-effects, approval, and recovery.

MCP is a great standard for connection and transport. But in the spec, a tool is just a function with a name and a schema. It does not decide the order of operations or which ones are dangerous.

This creates the verb gap. APIs give agents nouns and CRUD operations. Agents need verbs that carry intent.

Look at GitHub. They are narrowing their toolset to improve agent reasoning. They are learning that a 1:1 mapping from product API to agent tools does not work.

Research shows that an API can be structurally valid but semantically useless for an agent. An agent-native API answers more than just "what do I return." It answers:

  • What is the goal?
  • What state am I in?
  • What are the side-effects?
  • Do I need approval?
  • How do I recover?

Instead of a raw write, you need a split:

  • Preview the action.
  • Get explicit approval.
  • Commit the change.
  • Rollback if it fails.

This is not just an "agent edition." This is simply a better API. Developers want previews, clear permission errors, and rollbacks too. Eventually, the agent-native design will replace the human-centric one.

The shift is massive. It affects APIs, CLIs, and logs. We must move from human-readable prose to machine-parseable state.

Safety is not a wrapper you add later. Safety is a property you design into the operation itself.

Source: https://dev.to/gyu07/every-api-will-be-rebuilt-for-agents-2hj4

Optional learning community: https://t.me/GyaanSetuAi