AI Coding Assistants and the Case for More Open APIs

The rise of AI coding assistants is changing who can write software. Tasks that once required years of experience can now be handled by hobbyists, power users, or curious individuals with just a little help from AI. You no longer need to be a professional developer to automate the friction points in your daily life—and doing so can be surprisingly satisfying.

This shift has significant implications for software platforms: now is the time to expose more functionality through clean, secure APIs. If a feature exists in your product, there's increasingly little reason not to make it accessible programmatically. What once seemed niche or too complex is quickly becoming mainstream thanks to AI tools that bridge the skill gap.

Take Strava, for example. I use it to log my bike rides and happily pay for the service. Strava already offers APIs for many things, but not for its cycling heatmaps—an aggregated layer showing where people ride most often. Historically, they may have assumed that few people would need access to that data in code. That assumption made sense when writing the necessary software required expertise. But in a world of AI-assisted development, that’s no longer the case.

If you're responsible for API strategy at a software company, it's time to rethink what counts as “developer-facing.” The line between user and developer is blurring—and the platforms that recognize this shift early will be the ones that thrive.