Headless does not mean “no screen anywhere.” It means you are not required to use the company’s app or site to finish the job.

You might say: “Book a flight and a hotel in Tokyo.” A helper (with hooks into services, e.g. MCP or other agent APIs) talks to airlines and hotels for you. You might never see their homepage or their “join our club” popup.

Whilst I can see where the author is going with this, I can’t see some tasks, particularly booking concert tickets, being done by AI agents. Whilst it may be convenient for end users, it’s also open to exploitation by scalpers.

It’s hard for me to agree with this premise. Specifically, the motion that companies will abdicate having their own space, in the form of a mobile app and UI. The author seems to suggest that the future will be API-driven, as more people want to “do things” rather than “go somewhere”. That is to say, if I may further summarize the author’s claims, the future of mobile computing is less about creating a digital storefront to invite potential customers into, but to be as transactional as possible.

And while it is exceedingly enticing for me to think that one day, we could have a way to instantly cancel a Netflix or Comcast subscription, without the need to interact with any service agent, skipping over the upsell or retention attempts, and getting straight to the point, that just seems too far-fetched and anti-capitalist to actually happen in the near future.

Why would it be that at this particular moment in history, when corporations seek to own more capital, would they then seek to abandon their digital storefronts? At the moment, they have sole control over that space, and the present abandonment of anti-trust enforcement means they can force people into their storefronts against their will. In an environment where arbitration agreements are forced upon consumers, why would large companies want mobile apps that don’t hold their customers as hostage? Having an open API to do the same thing as their app is tantamount to freeing the consumer.

And that’s precisely why I can’t see why they would do that. I don’t like it, but that’s the present reality. But even more to the point, abandoning apps would be bending the knee to AI companies like Google or OpenAI, since it establishes the AI agents as the kingmakers. What sort of a Game of Thrones is this?

For each app that exists now, their corporate owner is a king in their own kingdom. In this supposed new world, those kings are now mere nobles that pay tithe to their new emperor, from the treasuries of their kingdoms. An entertaining fiction, yes. But as a non-fiction? I might pick a different book.

You don’t need AI for headless apps; you can (and often should) just forego a dedicated UI if existing platforms are a simpler approach. E.g. in most Indian cities we book metro/subway tickets not through an app, but over a WhatsApp text with a simple bot.