DevOps / SRE / Platform · 01.08.2026, 14:03 UTC
Designing APIs for agents
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | DevOps / SRE / Platform |
| Quelle | The New Stack ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 01.08.2026 UTC |
Sicherheitsmeldung mit Schweregrad noch nicht bewertet. Technische Details im Tab „Originaltext“; empfohlene Schritte in der Checkliste.
In early 2025, Webflow started building for MCP before there was a clear playbook for agent-ready APIs. We publicly announced our MCP server in April 2025, then joined Cloudflare’s May 2025 Demo Day alongside the first wave of remote MCP servers.
Our first approach was straightforward: wrap existing APIs as MCP tools. But we quickly learned that APIs designed for developers don’t work well for agents. Developer APIs assume humans can read docs, do research, or get answers from various external sources, compose granular endpoints, manage state, and handle failures manually. Agents operate with far less implicit context and rely heavily on the API surface itself to guide planning and execution, and whether to retry, revise, or stop. So directly exposing Developer APIs to agents made our early MCP tools too low-level and overly chatty, often requiring many tool calls for simple tasks while struggling with more complex workflows. The result was subtle failures, inefficient runtimes, and unreliable task completion.
“APIs designed for developers don’t work well for agents. Developer APIs assume humans can read docs, do research, compose granular endpoints, manage state, and handle failures manually.”
Over the following year, we iterated heavily: redesigning tools around intents instead of endpoints, simplifying schemas, improving tool-calling efficiency, and making responses easier for agents to reason about. We also keep investing deeply in the underlying foundations – from the code layer to filesystem abstractions – to support more reliable and capable agent …