Every App Becomes an API in the Age of Personal Agents

Two voices from opposite ends of the AI ecosystem are converging on the same conclusion. Pete Koomen, Group Partner at Y Combinator, recently laid out five observations about building software right now. Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, distilled it even further: all apps will become APIs or disappear. Both are pointing at the same seismic shift - the primary consumer of software is no longer the human sitting at the screen.

The Five Realities of Building Software Now

Pete Koomen’s observations are deceptively simple:

1. You can write code quickly now. AI coding tools have collapsed the time between idea and implementation. A feature that once took a sprint now takes an afternoon.
2. Competitors can too. Speed is no longer a moat. If you can ship in a day, so can every other team with access to the same models.
3. So can your users. This is the uncomfortable one. Your users aren’t just consumers anymore - they’re builders. They can spin up competing tools, custom scripts, or personal workflows faster than your product team ships updates.
4. If it takes more than a few clicks, an agent should be able to do it. Manual multi-step workflows are debt. Anything that requires a human to click through screens in sequence is a candidate for agent automation.
5. Users probably want to use their own agents. People don’t want to learn your interface. They want to tell their agent what to do and let the agent figure out the interface.

Each point compounds the last. When everyone writes code fast, competitive advantage shifts away from execution speed toward something else entirely: how well your product serves agents as its primary users.

Apps Become APIs or Disappear

Peter Steinberger pushes this logic to its endpoint. If agents are the consumers, then visual interfaces become optional. What matters is the API surface - structured, predictable, machine-readable interactions.

His argument breaks into two predictions:

• Apps that remain will be games or sensor-heavy. These are experiences that fundamentally require human perception: real-time visuals, physical input, spatial awareness. A game needs a screen. A fitness tracker needs a body. Everything else is fair game for agent consumption.
• Your agent, not you, will be the primary consumer of software. The booking app, the email client, the project management tool - your agent will interact with these on your behalf. The UI becomes a debugging tool for when the agent gets stuck, not the primary interaction surface.

This isn’t theoretical. OpenClaw already demonstrates the pattern: a personal agent that runs on your machine, accessible via iMessage or Telegram, executing terminal commands, managing files, browsing the web. The human gives high-level intent. The agent handles the implementation.

The Inversion of Software Design

If agents are the primary consumers, software design inverts. The questions change:

• Old question: How do we make this workflow intuitive for a human?
• New question: How do we expose this capability so an agent can use it reliably?

This means APIs need to be self-describing. Error messages need to be parseable, not just human-readable. Authentication needs to support agent delegation. Rate limiting needs to account for automated consumption patterns.

The winners won’t be companies with the best dashboards. They’ll be companies with the cleanest, most composable APIs - the ones that an agent can discover, authenticate against, and orchestrate without human intervention.

What This Means for Developers

If you’re building a product right now, the implications are concrete:

• API-first is no longer a best practice - it’s survival. If your product can’t be consumed programmatically, agents will route around it to competitors that can.
• Multi-step UIs are a liability. Every wizard, every multi-page form, every workflow that requires sequential human clicks is friction that agents will eliminate - by using a competitor’s API instead.
• Your users’ agents are your new users. Design for them. Document your APIs like your product depends on it, because it does.
• Competitive moats shift to data and integrations. When code is cheap to write and UIs are bypassed by agents, the defensible assets become proprietary data, network effects, and deep integration ecosystems.

We Are in the Year of the Personal Agent

Both Pete and Peter are describing the same inflection point from different angles. Pete sees it from the builder’s perspective: the tools have leveled the playing field, and users themselves are becoming builders. Peter sees it from the product’s perspective: if software isn’t agent-accessible, it’s dead software.

Personal AI agents are quietly taking over daily workflows. Not as a future promise - as a present reality. People are running agents that manage their calendars, triage their email, file their expenses, and deploy their code. The interface is a chat message. The execution happens through APIs.

The year of the personal agent isn’t coming. It’s here. The question for every software builder is whether your product is ready to be consumed by one.