Headless everything for personal AI

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: Honeycomb — AI agents behave unpredictably. Get the context you need to debug what actually happened. Read the blog Headless everything for personal AI. Matt Webb thinks headless services are about to become much more common: Why? Because using personal AIs is a better experience for users than using services directly (honestly); and headless services are quicker and more dependable for the personal AIs than having them click round a GUI with a bot-controlled mouse. Evidently Marc Benioff thinks so too: Welcome Salesforce Headless 360: No Browser Required! Our API is the UI. Entire Salesforce & Agentforce & Slack platforms are now exposed as APIs, MCP, & CLI. All AI agents can access data, workflows, and tasks directly in Slack, Voice, or anywhere else with Salesforce Headless. If this feed does take off it's going to play havoc with existing per-head SaaS pricing schemes. I'm reminded of the early 2010s era when every online service was launching APIs. Brandur Leach reminisces about that time in The Second Wave of the API-first Economy, and predicts that APIs are ready to make a comeback: Suddenly, an API is no longer liability, but a major saleable vector to give users what they want: a way into the services they use and pay for so that an agent can carry out work on their behalf. Especially given a field of relatively undifferentiated products, in the near future the availability of an API might just be the crucial deciding factor that leads to one choice winning the field. Posted 19th April 2026 at 9:46 pm Recent articles Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - 18th April 2026 Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year - 17th April 2026 Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7 - 16th April 2026 This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 19th April 2026. apis 98 matt-webb 26 salesforce 5 saas 18 ai 1968 brandur-leach 13 Monthly briefing Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments. Pay me to send you less! Sponsor & subscribe Disclosures Colophon © 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026