How to LLM-proof your API spec before agents exploit its ambiguities

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A developer discovered the hard way that LLM-driven agents, unlike human developers, do not infer intent or pause before acting — an agent hit a DELETE endpoint 400 times in a loop before the issue was caught. The author argues that API specs must now be written with machine callers in mind, including precise semantic descriptions for every field and parameter, since agents will confidently hallucinate values when documentation is thin. Key hardening measures include mandatory idempotency keys on all non-GET endpoints, a dry-run mode explicitly marked as safe and free, and a two-step confirmation flow for destructive operations using short-lived single-use tokens. These changes were made entirely in the API spec rather than the underlying code, demonstrating that documentation clarity is now a critical line of defense. The author frames these practices not as agent-specific features but as essential safeguards for any API likely to be consumed by automated systems.

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