Claude Code is your customer

by mfbx9da4 on 1/27/2026, 9:09:25 AM

Comments

by: windowshopping

I use claude code daily, but I've never been in a situation where Claude code was "deciding which product to use," that doesn't make sense to me. Claude is never on the web reading documentation - as far as I can tell that's not even in its toolkit. Can anyone give me more context for this? How do you end up having Claude code reading documentation and "choosing" a product to use? What type of prompts lead to this? I'm typically using it to add features to an existing repo, which doesn't really require any new services, to be fair, so I just haven't run into it I guess, but I didn't even know it was possible.

1/31/2026, 9:12:55 PM

by: galaxyLogic

I recently had to fill out a PDF form to send it to the Social Security Admininistration. They didn't have the option of submitting it online so I had to print it out and take it to them.I filled out the PDF using FireFox PDF-editor, at which point it occurred to me, this is not so different from using an application which has a form for me to enter data into it.Maybe in a few years Government has a portal where I can submit any of their forms as PDF documents, and they would probably use AI to store the contents of the form into a database.A PDF-form is kind of a Universal API, especially when AI can extract and validate the data from it. Of all the API-formats I've seen I think PDF-forms is the most human-friendly. Each "API" is defined by the form-identifier in the PDF-form. It is easy for humans to use, and pretty easy for office-clerks to create such forms, especially with the help of AI. I wonder will this, or something similar, catch on?

1/31/2026, 10:20:45 PM

by: aaronbrethorst

I think Claude Opus needs to re-read Steve Yegge's platform rant and rewrite that part about Amazon. <a href="https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611</a>

1/31/2026, 9:09:28 PM

by: liampulles

Is the idea here that you should make a very clear and well documented API because you expect customer agents to automatically make contracts with you to use your API? Just sommer skipping the process of evaluating you as a vendor?Maybe vibe coders will do this, but I don't expect a business that operates like this to last very long.If the expectation is that the customer is still going to put the work in to evaluate you, then is there no room for them to build a client, to expose their own internal API?

1/31/2026, 10:46:30 PM

by: econ

This guy really deserves a medal.I can't count how many times I could have made an API that no one would use. I would also have to document it at which I'm exclusively terrible (I find out later trying to make sense of my own docs) I can now generate and test the docs which changes everything.I wonder, could a spa (while still doable) now be the wrong approach? The logic will have to be in the API, why have it twice? It seems offloading work to the client might just add bloat. Could it be that if the website works with [dumb] queries the AI won't even need to read docs?

1/31/2026, 10:08:33 PM

by: code443

The loop closes eventually. Right now I read your article and think "I should make my docs more agent-friendly." But if I delegate that task to an agent, the agent reads your article, understands why agent-friendly docs matter, and rewrites my docs accordingly.At some point the agents reading your article ARE the agents that will consume those improved docs. The feedback loop becomes fully autonomous.

1/31/2026, 10:36:06 PM

by: unforbiddenYet

I can see the point of agent-first workflows in the future where we interact with agent UI instead of SaaS/PaaS dashboards but I don’t think every other problem and subsequently a solution will need to be agentified. A massive chunk of interactions would still require a good-old UI i.e. filing taxes, signing contracts, banking, e-government etc.

1/31/2026, 10:17:33 PM

by: nine_k

> "Going into 2026 the single best way to build an "AI native startup" is to build an API first product that can easily be used by Claude Code. I believe in this so much that I think by 2030 any product without an API designed for agents will be dead."IOW, a human customer is not the customer your business is going to directly serve, their agent is. What's required from the human is to provide a payment method, I assume, else it's not a real customer, but a free-tier user.

1/31/2026, 8:48:01 PM

by:

1/31/2026, 9:10:25 PM

by: airstrike

this post, as many people do rn, conflates Claude Code with Claudethere are many Claude Code variants waiting to be built. not TUI code editors, but environments in which LLMs get superpowersthat's the product you should build rn

1/31/2026, 11:44:49 PM

by: wiether

> I think by 2030 any product without an API designed for agents will be deadAnd I think that products making billions today by only exposing a 20yo SOAP API are still going to make billions in 4 years.I hate having to work with them, but I've been playing this game long enough to know that most of the world is running on legacy software and it won't change in about 1400 days.

1/31/2026, 9:05:14 PM

by: andrewmutz

This doesn’t make sense to me. Of all the things I will delegate to Claude Code, vendor selection would be one of the last.

1/31/2026, 9:40:29 PM

by: risyachka

All websites had all incentives to be api-first for 2 decades now.They aren't API first not because they can't - but because customers will use whatever GUI website supports to use it.Unless your product has no value - users will fill out those forms manually if you don't provide API if they need your product.Agents don't change this.

1/31/2026, 9:30:54 PM

by: internet2000

This is kind of an insane take, and I doubt the year predictions will age well. But I REALLY agree with it and hope it is true."Talk to Sales for pricing" is bullshit and has always been bullshit. Shitty web UIs with no bulk change capabilities, but that you can script using the internal API from the Dev Tools Network tab are bullshit. If AI helps drag this industry into the future away from that, I welcome it.

1/31/2026, 10:57:56 PM

by: franze

honestly everything with more than 3 form fields is filled out by claude codemy indian visa my 45 servers remote desktops on hetznerall thanks to cc

1/31/2026, 9:24:42 PM

by: jrflowers

Claude Code doesn’t even have a car why would it buy my “my other car is another similar car” bumper stickers?

1/31/2026, 10:13:10 PM

by: danvoell

Nice post, makes sense.

1/31/2026, 8:57:45 PM

by: m3kw9

same with tools and apps with GUI will need to have better API's for controls

1/31/2026, 10:26:23 PM

by: gjsman-1000

I'm going to say an unpopular opinion here: I think agents are going to turn out mostly useless, even if they worked almost perfectly.How many jobs involve purely clicking things on a computer without human authorities, rules, regulations, permits, spending agreements, privacy laws, security requirements, insurance requirements, or licensing gates?I wager, almost none. The bottleneck in most work isn't "clicking things on a computer." It's human judgment, authorization chains, regulatory gates, accountability requirements, and spending approvals. Agents automate the easy part and leave the hard part untouched. Meanwhile, if the agents also get it wrong, even 1% of the time, that's going to add up like compound interest in wasted time. Anything that could actually be outsourced to an agent, would have already been outsourced to Kenya.

1/31/2026, 8:57:01 PM

by: love2read

Every single blogger is running to make a post talking about how ai can visit websites now in different words.

1/31/2026, 8:58:20 PM

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