Over the past two years I have heard the words AI Native so much the term itself has lost all meaning. For a while it just meant copying an existing product and adding a chat window that could answer every tenth question correctly. However with the advent of Claude Code I can finally see what AI native really means for the future of SAAS, and surprisingly AI native has been 24 years in the making.
Over the past year I've been continually building different agentic workflows and AI apps (I'm so special give me a medal), most of the tooling is a solution in search of a problem (Langchain) or targeted towards non-developers (N8N). However the sharp pain I kept encountering was having to setup janky browser automations or dealing with half-baked MCP servers vs being able to work with a well documented API. This has very quickly become the deciding factor for picking which provider I use for a numerous amount of tools, because agents are the end user now, not humans.
Going into 2026 the single best way to build an "AI native startup" is to build an API first product that can easily be used by Claude Code. I believe in this so much that I think by 2030 any product without an API designed for agents will be dead.
One of the best examples of this I've seen is Commenda, Spencer and Yaacov have turned their entire SAAS platform for entity and tax management into an API (https://api.docs.commenda.io).
If I'm picking a vendor and vendor A has a strong API even if vendor B is 90% cheaper it doesn't matter. I will never be able to unlock productivity gains from agents from vendor B, slowing down my entire organization.
The Bezos Mandate Was Preparing for This
Let me give you the quick history lesson. In 2002, Jeff Bezos sent out what's now known as the Bezos API Mandate. The key parts were basically: "All teams will expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. All service interfaces must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable." And then the legendary final line: "Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired."
At the time this seemed insane. Why would you design internal tools as if external developers were going to use them? You're just adding complexity for no reason. But Bezos understood something that wouldn't become obvious for another decade-when you force yourself to think "external first," you build better products. You write better docs. You make cleaner interfaces. You can't rely on tribal knowledge or Slack messages to explain how things work.
Fast forward to today and that mandate makes even more sense but for a completely different reason. Bezos was thinking about human developers. I don't think he could have predicted that the "external developer" would be an AI agent that's reading your API docs and making decisions about whether to use your service in real-time.
Your API Docs Are Now Your Primary UI
This is the shift that most companies haven't internalized yet. When Claude Code is evaluating which service to use, it's not looking at your beautiful landing page or your slick dashboard. It's reading your API documentation. Your docs are literally your product now.
I've watched Claude Code pick between competing services in real-time and the decision often comes down to: "Which API can I actually understand and implement successfully?" If your error messages are cryptic, if your authentication flow requires three different dashboards, if your rate limits aren't clearly documented-you just lost a customer. Not because a human evaluated you and decided against it, but because an agent tried to integrate you and failed.
The bar is higher now. "API-first" was already table stakes, but now it's "agent-first." That means:
- Error messages that actually explain what went wrong and how to fix it
- Examples in your docs that can be copied and run immediately
- Consistent patterns across all your endpoints (agents pattern match)
- Clear pricing that can be understood programmatically
- Idempotent operations (agents will retry, deal with it)
Every time I see a SAAS product with API docs that say "Contact sales for API access" I know that company is going to be obsolete in 3 years. The agent can't contact sales. The agent will pick the competitor that has a clear "Get API Key" button.
The Economics Change Completely
Here's where it gets interesting. When Jeff Lawson wrote about the API supply chain, he was talking about how AWS turned infrastructure from a massive upfront investment into "spend maybe a hundred bucks and launch in a few minutes." The API economy did the same thing for specialized services-instead of building your own payment processing, just integrate Stripe.
But humans were still the orchestrators. A developer would spend weeks integrating 5 different services and then that integration would stay static for months or years. The switching costs were high because developer time is expensive.
With agents, switching costs collapse to near zero. Claude Code can rip out one service and replace it with another in minutes. If your API starts having issues, if your pricing changes unfavorably, if a competitor launches with better docs-I can tell Claude "replace vendor X with vendor Y" and it's done before lunch.
This means the moats that SAAS companies relied on (high switching costs, integration complexity, workflow lock-in) are evaporating. The new moats are:
- API quality and reliability - Agents will notice if you're down
- Data depth - If you have proprietary data agents need, that's defensible
- Network effects - But only if they're technical (integrations with other services agents use)
- Agent ecosystem - Being the default choice that agents know about, Vercel is the best example of this.
Brand loyalty doesn't exist for agents. Claude Code doesn't care if you're a unicorn with great Series C coverage. It cares if your API works.
The Volume Economics
One human developer might make 100 API calls a day while building something. That same developer with Claude Code might make 10,000 API calls in a day because the agent is exploring, testing, debugging, and iterating at machine speed.
Then there's agent-to-agent communication. Claude Code calls your API to provision something, which triggers another service, which calls another API. The interaction volume is going to explode in a way that most infrastructure wasn't designed for.
This is why I think we're about to see a replay of the cloud infrastructure boom from 2010-2020, but for agent infrastructure. The companies that can scale to handle autonomous agent traffic, that price in a way that makes sense for per-interaction billing, that can handle the support burden of agents hitting edge cases-those are the ones that will win.
What This Means For Founders
If you're building a new SAAS product in 2026, the playbook has changed:
1. Start with the API
Not "we'll add an API later." Start with the API. Your web dashboard should be built on top of the same API that customers will use. If you can't build your own UI with your public API, your API isn't good enough.
2. Test with agents first
Before you launch, give Claude Code your API docs and see if it can successfully integrate your service without human help. If it can't, your docs aren't good enough. This is your new usability test.
3. Design for programmatic discovery
Agents need to be able to find you, evaluate you, and integrate you without human intervention. That means your pricing needs to be clear on your docs page. Your getting started guide needs to work. Your examples need to be copy-pasteable.
4. Instrument for agent analytics
You need to know which of your customers are humans vs agents. The usage patterns are completely different. An agent might hit an error and retry 50 times in a second. That's not a bug, that's an agent debugging. Your monitoring and alerting needs to understand this.
5. Price for usage, not seats
The "per seat" SAAS model dies with agents. One human with Claude Code replaces a team of 5. If you're charging per seat, you just lost 80% of potential revenue. Usage-based pricing is the only model that survives.
The Companies That Already Get It
The fascinating thing is that the companies best positioned for this shift are the ones that internalized the Bezos mandate a decade ago. Stripe, Twilio, AWS-they already built for programmatic access as the primary interface. Adding agent optimization is incremental for them.
The companies that are screwed are the ones that built beautiful dashboards and treated their API as an afterthought for "power users." Those companies are about to watch their market share evaporate as agents preferentially choose the vendors they can actually integrate with.
I've already started seeing this in real-time. I needed an email solution last week and I had it narrowed down to two options. One had an incredible web console and mediocre API docs. The other had decent docs with clear examples. I chose the second one purely because Claude Code could set everything up without me having to click through dashboards. The first company lost a customer without ever knowing I was evaluating them.
This Is Just The Beginning
We're maybe 6 months into the "agents as customers" era. Most companies haven't even realized this shift is happening yet. They're still thinking about "adding AI features" when they should be thinking about "becoming the vendor that AI agents prefer."
By 2027 I predict that "agent success rate" will be a key metric companies track-what percentage of agents that try to integrate your service actually succeed? By 2028, I think we'll see the first agent-native companies that literally don't have a web dashboard at all, just an API and a docs site. By 2030, any product that can't be used by an agent will be as dead as a product without mobile support is today.
The Bezos mandate was preparing for external developers. The API economy made specialized services composable. B2CC completes the arc-fully autonomous customers that can evaluate, integrate, and use your product without human intervention.
If you're building SAAS in 2026, ask yourself: Could Claude Code successfully use my product? If the answer is no, you're building for the past.