The gap between websites that offer APIs and websites that do not is becoming one of the more pressing obstacles for the growing class of AI-powered agents that need to interact with external software. A recent Hacker News submission from developer staaake highlights the problem and offers a product aimed at closing it.
The Problem Nobody Talks About Anymore
Many of the most widely used software products on the internet still lack public APIs. Developers who build tools that need to integrate with platforms like event management services, booking systems, or niche SaaS products quickly discover that some major providers have no developer documentation, no API endpoints, and no intention of adding them. The workaround has always been manual integration or screen scraping, but both approaches break down as the number of connected services grows.
That problem was familiar to staaake, who built a platform called staaake Meets for organizing and sharing tech events around the world. The platform allows users to create an event once and distribute it across services like Luma, Meetup, and Eventbrite. Each of those platforms has a public API, so the integration worked smoothly.
The trouble appeared when staaake tried to expand to additional platforms like Partiful, which does not offer a public API. That single friction point opened the door to a broader realization. Across numerous projects, the same pattern kept surfacing: large, well-known products simply do not expose their data or functionality through programmable interfaces.
Why AI Agents Make This Worse
The rise of AI agents built on systems like Claude and ChatGPT has amplified the stakes. An agent that can reason, plan, and take actions on a user's behalf needs to communicate with the same software humans use. But if a product has no API, there is no clean way for an agent to read its data, trigger its functions, or exchange information with it programmatically.
This is not a hypothetical concern. As agents move from generating text to executing real-world tasks, they encounter walled gardens at every turn. A product without an API is effectively invisible to an agent, no matter how capable the agent might be. The result is a fragmented ecosystem where some software interoperates freely and a large portion remains locked off.
staaake Connector: API and MCP Generation for Any Website
To address the gap, staaake built a product called staaake Connector, available at staaakeconnector.com. The concept is straightforward. A user connects their backend to the service, selects the functionality or data they want to expose, and the tool generates both an API and an MCP server for the product.
MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is a standard that allows AI agents to interact with external tools and services in a structured way. By generating an MCP server alongside a conventional API, the tool makes the product accessible both to traditional software integrations and to AI agents that rely on the MCP protocol.
Beyond the API and MCP generation, the service also provides webhooks and an SDK. The webhooks allow the product to push notifications and events to connected systems, while the SDK gives developers a pre-built way to consume the generated interfaces without writing everything from scratch.
A Network Layer for Humans, Products, and Agents
Alongside the connector tool, staaake also built out a community network. The network serves as a place where humans, products, and AI agents can discover and connect with one another. It is an attempt to solve the distribution problem that often accompanies integration tools: even if you can generate an API for a product, the effort is only worth it if other systems and agents can find and use it.
The Practical Significance
What makes this submission worth covering is not the product itself but the problem it points to. The internet was built around documents and hyperlinks, but the next phase of software interaction involves agents acting on behalf of people across dozens of services. If a meaningful share of those services remains API-less, the entire workflow grinds to a halt at the point of integration.
Tools that can generate APIs and MCP servers from existing websites lower the barrier significantly. They do not require the original product owners to change anything. They work by bridging the gap from the outside, which is exactly what is needed when the people who control a product have no incentive or plan to expose it programmatically.
The submission received modest attention on Hacker News, drawing three points and a handful of comments within the first hour of posting. Staaake, who noted on the thread that it had been a while since they used the site, expressed interest in feedback from developers building agents or products that need to interact with external software.
Whether staaake Connector becomes a widely adopted standard remains to be seen. But the underlying problem it addresses, the mismatch between the growing capabilities of AI agents and the limited availability of programmable interfaces across the web, is only going to become more urgent as agents take on more autonomous roles.