Making APIs ready for agents

How do you make an API ready for AI agents to use? I posed this question to a handful of API experts and put together a comprehensive guide for The New Stack — published today.

The key takeaway: making RESTful APIs agent-ready takes way more than just wrapping them in MCP (although that's helpful). 

It'll require having a well-defined spec, setting new traffic controls, comprehensive error responses with next steps, documenting common workflows, and having monetization in place (when applicable), and more...

There are also some big security and ethical concerns to keep in mind.

This space is rapidly evolving, and the practices will likely change. But I think following this guide will be a really strong foundation for API providers in mid-2025.

Please give it a read and feel free to let me know what you think, especially if we missed any key areas.