APIs and the Problem of Coordinated Software

TL;DRNo matter how cheap AI makes software, that software still has to interact with other people’s software, and traditional APIs are _grotesquely_ inflexible.The only way we can obtain the dividends that AI and cheap software promise is to thoroughly redesign APIs. The answer lies in the relational model: new APIs must be relational and programmable.Thanks for reading FREST Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Pencils DownThe originator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), gave a provocative presentation at RubyConf in 2026 in which he explained that he no longer writes Ruby code, or indeed much code at all. Instead, he has AI agents write mostly Rust code. Although he abhors Rust, agents can write it for him and it runs fast.Others are writing about similar changes to the software landscape. Shopify is abandoning React Native in favour of separate native apps — it is just as easy to write multiple versions of everything now, so that…