- Coinbase's Lincoln Murr said APIs are the base layer for agents, with MCP and CLI as ways of wrapping them.
- Mintlify's CTO said agents rose from about 10% to about 80% of viewership on its documentation sites, per an internal tracker.
Mintlify CTO Hahnbee Lee said on the AI Engineer podcast that agents now make up most views of its documentation sites. Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's head of AI product, said APIs are the base layer for agents. Lee added that the front end matters less. The episode was published on 1 November 2026.
What was said
Asked whether Coinbase is doubling down on APIs for agents, Murr said: "APIs are the name of the game." An API is a set of rules that lets one program ask another to act. He said an API can be wrapped in MCP, a standard that lets AI agents use outside tools.
Murr described layers. The API is the base. MCP adds context for natural-language use. A CLI, the command-line form, is much the same but needs a terminal. All of them, he said, wrap the same access in a form an agent can use.
Lee agreed. Agents work in code and handle command-line instructions well, he said, so software firms should invest in APIs, even if that looks a little traditional. He added that the "front end is not mattering as much either."
Lee also gave a figure from an internal tracker. Early in the year, agents were about 10% of viewership across Mintlify's sites. Now, he said, they are closer to 80%. Human viewership is not falling; agent viewership is rising faster.
Why it matters
Our reading: if the API is the real product and MCP and CLI are wrappers, the effort belongs in the underlying access. Anything a person can do on screen but not through an API may be out of reach for agents.
Access control follows. In the talk on agents and money, a speaker said you do not want to give an agent unrestricted access to your account. That suggests narrow permissions, so an agent gets one job and nothing more.
Documentation changes too. One speaker said agents do not care what a site looks like or how it is branded, so substance may count for more than polish. A manager could list what customers do on the site and check which tasks a program could do alone.
The other side
Both guests hedged. Lee said investing in APIs makes sense at least for now, because developers are the earliest adopters. Murr said that if the MCP wrapper changes, they will see, and that the tools are far from their endgame.
The 80% figure covers Mintlify's own documentation sites and comes from an internal tracker. Putting the whole business behind APIs is something Coinbase is doing, not a general finding. The excerpts do not show whether shops or banks see the same shift, or what the work costs.
Written by the WebPulse Newsroom with AI assistance, and checked by our editorial review: every quotation was verified against the recording's transcript. How we use AI.
The conversation this talking point comes from
- AI Engineer: Most of Your Docs Readers Are Now AI Agents - Hahnbee Lee, Mintlify & Lincoln Murr, Coinbase (2026-11-01)
