This image is a collage with a colourful Japanese vintage landscape showing a mountain, hills, flowers and other plants and a small stream. There are 3 large black data servers placed in the bottom half of the image, with a cloud of black smoke emitting from them, partly obscuring the scenery.

As Jan Muehlig posted on LinkedIn recently, a machine-first internet looks quite different from a human-first one. For a start, when people are using AI agents to get things done — find and book holidays, compare and contrast political manifestos, various work-related things — they don’t need to be accessing pretty websites.

This post begins by talking about 13 Markdown files which apparently wiped $285 billion off the valuations of publicly-traded technology companies. Markdown files are just text files and, in this case, were part of a “knowledge work plugin” for Claude Code which just gives it more context. As I’ve already discussed artificial general intelligence is already here — it’s just in AI companies' best interests to point to it being some thing to worry about in future.

I’ve probably got more to write about this, specifically about how a future beyond the web browser and apps looks like accessing your digital world via two dominant AI companies. I’m definitely not saying that’s a good thing, that’s just the trajectory we’re on currently.

So what does agentic-first software look like? Initially I thought we would see people replace SaaS tools (intentionally or not) with their home grown versions. While that’s definitely true, the improvement in agentic harnesses and the underlying models have meant that I think there’s a whole new category ready to emerge.

Effectively, API first solutions for each vertical. These are products built from the ground up to allow programmatic access - instead of the other way round where the UI is the main feature and API access is a checkbox on their feature list.

This means really thinking through the most flexible way to offer access to data. It also means generous and fast API access to it, along with access and permissions to control and secure it at scale.

This isn’t actually a new concept - we’ve had so-called “headless” CMSs and ecommerce platforms before AI came along. But I now think we’ll see an explosion of them.

Source: Martin Alderson

Image: Deborah Lupton