from Hacker News

Natural Language APIs Are Coming

by exizt88 on 3/24/23, 5:50 PM with 13 comments

• by arghnoname on 3/24/23, 6:44 PM

  It's like WYSIWYG web page tools. It will increase accessibility to APIs for less technically inclined people, but for a technical person trying to make a sophisticated product, it'll just get in their way.

  The same can be said for higher level vs lower level languages.

  We're constantly creating new abstractions for our tooling to make the computers do what we want to do, but we've never gotten rid of the need for people to get underneath that tooling and get down a layer or two or three of abstraction.

  My expectation is the pattern repeats, way more people get into this game, wages for people higher in the stack go down as their skillset gets democratized (e.g., that guy in the late 90s who knew HTML), and those that know how to peak under the covers become less needed numerically, but more essential when the rubber meets the road.

• by endisneigh on 3/24/23, 6:20 PM

  i'm not a fan. abstractions will inevitably become leaky and then people will be screwed. don't get me wrong, by all means, use them to iterate faster. but the idea that we'll use the so called NLAPIs without bothering to understand the actual code is ridiculous

• by leobg on 3/24/23, 9:17 PM

  Silly.

  Yes, there will be human language interfaces to existing APIs.

  But: The APIs themselves will still be in their own “non natural” language. Precisely because such a technical language defines boundaries.

  Even the author, in his example, admits to using AWS’ “terminology”.

  And that’s the point: In order to use an API, you must understand its basic concepts and limitations.

  The new “plug-ins” that OpenAI announced are proving this point. They are precisely the glue between the gooey human language understanding of ChatGPT and the prickly language of an API (to use some Alan Watts terminology).

• by EGreg on 3/24/23, 6:42 PM

  Why not just hook up ChatGPT up to a Zapier plugin? Sure it’s super centralized, but would work now.

  Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures (who I know since 2014) wrote a book called worldaftercapital.com . And he mentioned years ago that you should have personal assistant agents book stuff for you etc. and answer queries. Well that would require a more decentralized, open source approach:

  https://continuations.com/post/96355016855/labor-day-right-t...