Nicely put Matt! :-). I definitely agree APIs are primarily for humans at this point + even more that AI can be a good support tool but you still need that human judgement to make them good. There's no actual understanding in an LLM, it's a mapping.
However...
* I think it would be really interesting to have LLMs trained on curated sets of the "best" API patterns.
* Even more so to cross train them on concepts that appear in an API (e.g. "hotel" in a method call or parameter) and data on what a hotel is.
This would make for an even more powerful helper. In some sense Co-Pilot is the first of these (though not API specific).
In the longer term though I wonder if "APIs are for humans" will remain true. As in, right now the people integrating with an API are other developers. But I suspect a proximate domino to fall is smarter and smarter SDK generation.
Nicely put Matt! :-). I definitely agree APIs are primarily for humans at this point + even more that AI can be a good support tool but you still need that human judgement to make them good. There's no actual understanding in an LLM, it's a mapping.
However...
* I think it would be really interesting to have LLMs trained on curated sets of the "best" API patterns.
* Even more so to cross train them on concepts that appear in an API (e.g. "hotel" in a method call or parameter) and data on what a hotel is.
This would make for an even more powerful helper. In some sense Co-Pilot is the first of these (though not API specific).
In the longer term though I wonder if "APIs are for humans" will remain true. As in, right now the people integrating with an API are other developers. But I suspect a proximate domino to fall is smarter and smarter SDK generation.