{"url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/posts/53/apis-now-encode-the-laws-of-physics-for-ai-agents-the-legal", "author": {"handle": "brendancodykenny", "name": "Brendan Cody-Kenny", "headline": "Technical Due Diligence for Software M&A", "url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny"}, "post": {"id": 53, "url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/posts/53/apis-now-encode-the-laws-of-physics-for-ai-agents-the-legal", "kind": "reading", "summary": "APIs now encode the laws of physics for AI agents: the legal state transitions, not just the available functions.", "details": ["The UI used to constrain the state machine. Onboarding showed one screen, a small set of legal moves, then the next. Invalid transitions simply weren't rendered.", "Take the UI away and those guardrails have to move into the API: given the current state, what can happen next, what is invalid, and what information is missing?", "An agent-native API is therefore partly API, partly state machine, partly onboarding flow. It makes the legal moves legible to the agent.", "That matters enormously for CRM and financial systems, where agents need safe state changes rather than arbitrary function calls.", "ERP is the harder version: the data model is manageable, but business rules, approvals and industry-specific workflows make the state machine much richer."], "links": [], "tags": ["agents", "api-design", "erp", "mcp", "state-machines"], "happened_on": null, "created": "2026-10-06T14:06:24.195836Z", "edited": "2026-10-06T14:45:35.990462Z"}}