alt Hacker NewsWhere does this hypothetical API live? Within a walled garden? We almost have that already with delivery apps and some credit cards. They're awful precisely because they are rent seeking in the form of convenience fees and artificial scarcity.
What you call multimodal hell is what others call meaningful choice and market competition.
I get it. Usually when there is the possibility of using an API team A is still fighting to log in while as a 1 man team B I have something using the plain web already running.
Right now people are so angry about LLMs being a driver of enshittification that they aren’t realizing that LLMs are the first real threat to enshittification we’ve seen as they can wait for those stupid little anime girls and click on the street lights and the GDPR popups and ignore the ads and all of that.
I still imagine there’s another world where there was an open API for e-commerce that didn’t suck and the choice was adopt it or go out of business.