Simon Willison: 'Headless Everything' for Personal AI — Matt Webb's Thesis on Why Services Will Unbundle for AI Agents
Simon Willison's Blog·medium signal
Simon Willison highlights Matt Webb's essay arguing that headless services (APIs without UIs) are about to become much more common because personal AI agents provide a better UX than using services directly, and headless APIs are more reliable for agents than screen-scraping. The thesis: as personal AI becomes the primary interface, every service needs a headless mode. For builders: this is the architectural implication of the agent era — if your product doesn't have a machine-readable API, agents will route users to competitors that do.