Twelve years ago, I wrote a short post about a conversation that went roughly like this:

“I need programmatic access.”

“We don’t have an API.”

“Of course you do — it’s AMF behind your Flex UI. A little PyAMF script will do the trick.”

“Please don’t show it to anyone!”

The point was simple: every application that has a UI already has an API. The UI talks to something. That something is the API. You just haven’t admitted it yet.

Yesterday, I wrote a longer post about WebMCP — a shiny new W3C proposal from Google and Microsoft that adds a browser API so AI agents can interact with websites through “structured tools” instead of scraping the DOM.

The websites already have structured tools. They’re called APIs. The SPAs call them. The mobile apps call them. The CLI tools call them. They exist. They have endpoints, schemas, authentication. They are right there.

In 2014, the answer was: “Of course you have an API — it’s behind your Flex app.”

In 2026, the answer is: “Of course you have structured tools — they’re behind your React app.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.