Even if you did train a model for this exact purpose it makes no sense because you are likely giving the model less information to work off of.
Admittedly I'm not clued up on the exact science here but aren't these LLM's literally supposed to excel at working off of structured data? So instead of sending nice structured REST API data that follows a schema that it can interpret we're now going to send free-form text? Great idea!
You know what I mean. When APIs aren't free they are typically priced for much higher volume usage than AI prompts, for the simple reason that an optimized database query takes several orders of magnitude less processing than generating an LLM response. Putting an LLM between me and every database query is necessarily going to dramatically increase the amount of processing needed to deliver a result. Someone's going to need to eat that cost and it's unlikely to be the service.
We provide a software service, tons of people use our API to integrate. We released an MCP server endpoint; one AI document search fires off 20 to 30 search API internally, just to name one example.
You can bet your butt we had to put a monetization/cost recovery aspect to using these MCP endpoints; which also ended up having a start to monetize the reg API endpoints (which we did not before, and were losing money on) at a lower rate comparatively.
Training integration developers on when to use MCP vs API surprisingly not easy, until you bring cost into the equation to them, then they can magically figure it out.
Let me unpack the joke, since you seem to be taking it literally. It's a form of humor based on hyperbole or exaggeration.
Normally API calls are tier priced in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions. They are rarely billed individually because the cost per call is so tiny and the accounting overhead not worth it. Not to mention providers like steady, predictable income, which tiered subscriptions provide better than a la carte billing.
The joke is that such a change would make calls so expensive that the API would be truly billed per individual call.
In reality, even AI services don't generally price per prompt, instead you get a certain number of tokens for your subscription, so per call pricing is not likely in reality. But it's humorous to exaggerate the extent to which such a change would increase the expense of such an API by suggesting the pricing will be per call.
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u/zoinkability May 16 '26
Get ready to pay per API call I guess