When was the last time you were figuring out a new feature in an SDK and decided to look up the docs to learn how to integrate it? Mintlify reports that agent traffic to docs is already nearly matching human traffic. Most of us talk to an agent, ask it to go look up info on the docs or elsewhere and figure things out. The same pattern that docs have seen is just a precursor of every product experience.
In January 2025, Mathias Biilmann Christensen from Netlify talked about agent experience. The idea that all the products we interact with will and should be built to be interacted with by agents. We could believe that products will just get consumed by agents the same way humans have been using them. Not quite.
The biggest examples are Exa and Parallel Web Systems. These companies have redefined what search means by serving agents as their primary users, which raises the question why have new search APIs when search has been around for so long. Exactly because search that is optimal for humans is not necessarily optimal for agents. A human search string on average looks like “best CRM startups”, but an agent search string looks like “Series A B2B CRM companies founded after 2023 with open API docs”. An agent can go through several pages of info in seconds whereas a human needs a prioritized list of ranked and reranked content in a list. Search therefore had to be redesigned to be used by agents.
Sooner or later all products built for humans need to be rethought on how agent friendly they are. UI is not that critical for an agent to interact with. Everything underneath becomes so much more important. But this doesn't take away the need for good design. Designing these products is as difficult as designing a web UI and in fact even harder to test because this needs a new paradigm of QA.