Postman's latest Guidebook on building AI-ready APIs is one of the most important documents you can read today as a developer!
We are headed into an era where every website must be "Agent-ready".
- Agents will make purchases, not humans.
- Agents will find the best options, not humans.
- Agents will fill out job applications, not humans.
The same applies to APIs.
89% of devs use AI daily, but shockingly, only 24% design APIs with AI agents in mind.
Addressing this is crucial because while human devs can hustle through poor docs and broken endpoints, most Agents can’t.
They need:
- Predictable structures
- Machine-readable metadata
- Standardized behavior
The fix starts with machine-readable documentation that stays in sync with your schema.
Here's one idea I really like from
@getpostman's AI-ready APIs playbook about automating the documentation generation process.
If a human dev faces issues with docs, they can search the web, open Stack Overflow, and more.
But Agents can’t use what they don’t even understand.
Thus, APIs must be well-documented so that Agents can easily learn everything about them and establish an entry point.
Otherwise, they will have no reliable way to discover what endpoints exist, what parameters to pass, what data to expect in return, or how to recover from an error.
Postman’s Agent Mode automatically generates detailed, contextual documentation for APIs based on your request/response examples and usage patterns.
This video showcases its usage to generate machine-readable documentation.
This makes it simple to turn any collection into interactive docs that are always up-to-date for Agents.
On a side note, Agent Mode can do a lot more. This is Postman’s AI-powered platform to explore, debug, and build APIs using natural language.
Also, there’s a lot more in the AI-ready APIs Playbook that I haven’t covered here, but the core takeaway stays the same: Agents using APIs should NOT be guessing.
Document everything in a way that both humans and machines can understand.
Because every time an agent has to infer how your API works, you introduce friction, inconsistency, and potential errors.
Postman makes it trivial to design → document → publish → monitor APIs that both humans and agents can use reliably.
I have shared the Playbook in the replies.
Thanks to Postman for partnering today!