I saw a devtools CTO recently complaining about "programmer brainrot" and how engineers no longer read docs.

It's never been a good use of developer time to study SaaS APIs. Field-level API details of a third-party product are a small and unleveraged part of an engineer's job, and this is becoming much truer with coding agents.

I regularly ask agents to integrate with SaaS tools. The agent flails for 30 minutes, hits some 500 errors, and gives up eventually because it needs information that's only available through the UI. I switch to a simpler product (often one with a good llms.txt), and integration takes 5 minutes with an agent.

The reality is that if you're building devtools, polished SDKs and beautiful UIs are becoming secondary interfaces and you're now an API company.

What this means:

  • If there's a button in your console, it needs to be an API operation.
  • If your product ingests or produces data, there needs to be an API to export it.
  • If you're seeing people hit edge cases in Sentry, expect 10x more in 6 months.

Your primary DX surface is now for agents. The good news is that you can literally just run a test suite against it. And if you do it well, you can ease up on pixel-perfect and concise docs — developers will probably just ask Claude about your product anyway.

Mass adoption of coding agents is still early but things are moving fast. So now's a great time to become the best product for agents in your space.