An agent that works beautifully on your laptop is standing on cushions you stopped noticing: a human watching, a single user, your own credentials, a visible trace, your own judgment, and an undo key. Production removes them one by one. Engineering them back is what reliability actually means, and most of it is not a modeling problem.
An architectural view of how a financial data provider can make its data ready for autonomous and semi-autonomous agents. Workflow archetypes, the three human-in-the-loop bands, the surfaces (REST, SDK, MCP, agents.md, skills, code-as-action), and why the semantic layer is the product.
An essay from 2023 arguing that LLMs would become primary consumers of APIs, that API documentation would become in-demand training data, and that API product managers would soon be designing for a non-human customer. Republished with a 2026 note.
APIs aren't just functional contracts, they're user interfaces for developers. Great API design requires the same aesthetic judgment and taste that defines excellent product design.
An essay from 2023 arguing that natural-language queries would replace SQL as the primary interface to enterprise data, with the data catalog as the substrate that makes those queries trustworthy. Republished with a 2026 note.
Vibe coding has not only moved the make-or-buy boundary; it has turned building into a cheap option that reprices the whole decision, even for the core systems the cloud era taught everyone to rent. What should decide it is no longer the falling cost of code but the costs that do not fall with it, amortisation, accountability, data, and optionality.