Re:If agents become the users, what happens to the software ...
by jamiecode on Thursday February 26, 2026 @02:54AM
(#47163177)
Running autonomous agents daily confirms this. The brittle part isn't the model — it's the interfaces. An agent that needs to log into a web UI is maybe 30% as reliable as one that calls an API. DOM changes break things in ways that are hard to detect and even harder to recover from gracefully.
The transition you're describing is happening but unevenly. Some tools (Linear, GitHub, Stripe) have solid APIs that agents can use directly. Others are still UI-only or have APIs that feel like afterthoughts. The agents that work in production tend to have strong opinions about which integrations to use based on interface quality, not just feature set.
The broader shift you're pointing at — software designed for agent-to-agent interaction rather than human-to-UI — I'd expect to happen via MCP or similar protocols rather than replacing existing interfaces. The human UI and the agent API can coexist; the economics favor building both.
The transition you're describing is happening but unevenly. Some tools (Linear, GitHub, Stripe) have solid APIs that agents can use directly. Others are still UI-only or have APIs that feel like afterthoughts. The agents that work in production tend to have strong opinions about which integrations to use based on interface quality, not just feature set.
The broader shift you're pointing at — software designed for agent-to-agent interaction rather than human-to-UI — I'd expect to happen via MCP or similar protocols rather than replacing existing interfaces. The human UI and the agent API can coexist; the economics favor building both.