The human API

Every improvement in human communication has been about reducing latency. Letters took weeks. Phone calls took minutes but required both people to be available at the same time. Email removed the synchronous requirement but added a queue nobody can keep up with. Messaging made the queue real-time, which somehow made it worse.

All of these share the same bottleneck: a human has to process the request.

Now imagine a personal AI agent that handles your calendar, reads your email, knows your preferences, and can answer most questions people would normally ask you directly. Not because it was trained on some corporate knowledge base, but because it lives in your context. It knows what you know.

That changes communication entirely.

Someone asks "are you free Tuesday afternoon?" The agent already knows the answer. A colleague needs a status update on a project. The agent has the context. Someone wants to schedule a meeting. It doesn't need to ask you. It just does it.

The pattern is obvious if you squint. You've become an API.

There's an endpoint (the agent), a set of capabilities it can handle autonomously, and an escalation path for things that require your actual judgment. Most requests never reach you. The ones that do are genuinely important.

Think about what this means at scale. A person can realistically have maybe five meaningful conversations in a day. That's human throughput. Five requests processed, everything else waits in a queue called "I'll get back to you." With an agent handling the routine stuff, that constraint dissolves. The agent can serve dozens of requests simultaneously. Hundreds, eventually. Your "API" becomes horizontally scalable in a way that your brain never was.

The latency reduction here is different from what email or messaging achieved. Those tools made delivery faster. Agents make processing faster. The message doesn't sit in a queue waiting for someone to context-switch into it. It gets handled.

The agent won't commit to a business decision or send a sensitive email without sign-off. But it can triage, filter, and handle the 80% that doesn't need you. That 80% used to consume the same amount of attention as the 20% that actually matters.

There's a parallel to software architecture that I keep coming back to. We spent years building monolithic applications where every request went through a single process. Then we figured out that most requests don't need the full system. You put a cache in front, you add a load balancer, you handle the simple stuff at the edge. The expensive compute only fires when it has to.

That's what agents do for humans. They're the cache layer. The CDN. The edge function that handles the predictable requests so the origin server (your brain) only processes what actually requires it.

We've had the tools to reach each other instantly for years now. What we haven't had is a way to respond at scale without burning out. That's the piece that's changing. Not faster delivery, but faster processing. Not better inboxes, but fewer reasons to open them.