A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "We Had The Agent Protocol In 2008 And We Left It On The Table," Kin Lane, October 22, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/22/we-had-the-agent-protocol-in-2008-and-we-left-it-on-the-table/
Priya read the post on Thursday evening with a cold cup of tea beside her laptop. She was a platform engineer at a small company that sold scheduling software, and for the past month she had been wiring an agent to her team's internal API.
She liked the start. A man gave a talk on November 20, 2008, styled after an episode of a radio show, and the third act of it was the one everyone remembered as a pyramid. She had seen the pyramid in a slide deck years ago and never once read what went with it. The author had gone back and read it, and she felt a small, familiar guilt at that.
The line that stopped her was about forms. Links tell you where the resources are, and forms tell you what you can do to the resources. She read it twice. Her agent kept guessing at what it was allowed to do next, and she had been patching that with longer and longer instructions in a prompt.
Then the post turned toward her own week. It described generating three hundred MCP tools from an OpenAPI spec as the 2008 button with a new consumer. She had generated a little over two hundred last Tuesday and been pleased with how fast it went. She felt her face go warm, and then she felt defensive. The tools worked. Her demo had worked. The author wrote that the consumer pays in tokens and wrong guesses, and she did not enjoy admitting that the agent had made a lot of wrong guesses.
She did not accept all of it. The post said the incentives of the human era were not irrational, and she agreed, but it also leaned hard on the idea that the client had finally arrived. Her agent could read a link, sure. It could also confidently invent one. She wasn't ready to say the hard part was solved just because the reader now had a language model. She typed that thought into her notes app, unpolished, and left it there.
Still, one detail snagged. The post said that MCP rides on JSON-RPC, which it called the C library behind a single URI, and that people were now adding readOnlyHint and idempotentHint annotations to say what a GET already said. She had added exactly those annotations that morning, by hand, to eleven tools. She sat looking at that for a while.
She did not plan to rewrite anything. There was no budget for a hypermedia revival, and she doubted her manager would sign off on one. But the post's list of what to do was modest enough to try. Put the next step in the response. Pagination links were the cheapest example, and her list endpoint made the agent construct the next page's address from rules written only in a wiki page.
So before closing the laptop she opened the staging copy of the list endpoint and added a single field to the response, a link to the next page, using a relation name she looked up in the registered ones rather than making her own. She changed nothing else. Then she pointed the agent at it, asked it to fetch everything, and watched the log. It followed the link all the way to the last page and stopped without guessing once.
She drank the cold tea anyway and added a line to her notes under the disagreement: try it on one more endpoint tomorrow, and count the wrong guesses.