Gartner seems to be pointing at a future where teams use agents with computer-use to talk to apps directly when APIs are too painful, incomplete, or unreliable.
That's… not great.
Computer-use automation is slow, brittle, expensive to maintain, and usually a sign that something went wrong at the API layer.
2026 is going to be the year that teams realize their APIs aren't "agent-ready."
What does "agent-ready" even mean?
For an AI agent, an API needs clear, machine-readable contracts, up-to-date schemas, predictable behavior, tests that actually reflect reality, and docs that aren't lying.
Most APIs fail here not because engineers don't care, but because specs, tests, and docs live in different tools and drift apart over time.
Where Voiden fits into this
Voiden is an offline, file-centric API client that keeps specs, tests, and docs in one Markdown file, versioned in Git.
Why that matters for agents: the spec an agent reads is the same one used for validation. Tests don't drift from docs because they're the same artifact. Changes are reviewable in PRs. No cloud-only API definitions hidden behind tools.
You can define an API once, validate responses against OpenAPI schemas, and document behavior right next to executable requests.
If an agent is going to rely on your API, this kind of single source of truth becomes critical.
Otherwise… agents might route around you
Red flags for an API: under-documented, inconsistent, or locked in proprietary tools.
Agents will likely bypass these kind of APIs and fall back to computer-use automation.
That's slower, costlier, and harder to scale, but agents don't care. They'll take whatever path works.
Curious how others are thinking about this
Are you already thinking about "agent-first" APIs? Testing APIs as machine contracts, not just human docs? Keeping specs, tests, and docs actually in sync?
Would love to hear how people are preparing for this shift.
(For context: Voiden is an open, offline-first API workspace experimenting with this direction. Not saying it's the answer — but it's clearly aimed at the problem.)