Headless Everything for Personal AI (opens in new tab)

Interesting ideas. I would love programmatic access to everything, though I think it’s a stretch to expect this within a year. Personal AI agents are still niche.

I suspect the timeline will look something like this:

1. 1-2 years, Google and Microsoft expand the capabilities of their OS-integrated apps, including support for integrating with external apps. Microsoft rolls out “Cortana Communications Protocol” (CCP), a closed-source alternative to MCP that integrates with Copilot. People hate it.

2. 3-5 years, people become more accustomed to personal AI agents.

3. 7 years, Apple rolls out “Apple Intelligence Link Protocol” (AILP) Apple’s take on CCP and MCP. It becomes the de facto standard.

4. 10 years, AILP, CCP, and MCP converge into a single standard. 80% of backend web frameworks support this standard out of the box. All phones support it. Millenials everywhere are constantly confounded and befuddled by these AI personal assistants.

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It’s funny you mention the Salesforce CLI. I develop a Salesforce-based app for work. My agents and I likely run the `sf` command several hundred times a day.

First line: "It’s pretty clear that apps and services are all going to have to go headless: that is, they will have to provide access and tools for personal AI agents without any of the visual UI that us humans use today."

Nope. Not clear at all. Agents are good and getting even better about controlling GUIs like the browser and desktop apps.

Time and time again we've seen "dumb pipes" win. It ends up being much easier to build a smarter agent than rewrite every piece of software.

In the real world, this is why self-driving cars are a better option that replacing every road, street, highway, and avenue with rail.

On Windows the accessibility APIs give you this. And as these same APIs are used for screen readers, automated testing, and AI access, supporting them is definitely worthwhile.