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What agent-native means
Agent-native software is designed so that an AI agent is the primary operator and a person supplies intent and authorization, instead of a person operating the software with AI assisting.
Two ways to put AI in software
Most business software was built around a person with a screen. Adding AI to it usually means a chat box or a suggestion panel beside the same screens: the person still navigates, the AI helps. That is AI-assisted. Agent-native reverses the roles. The agent operates the software through commands and an API, and the person states what they want, checks what matters and approves what is risky.
The difference shows up in what a task costs the human. In AI-assisted software, asking for something still means knowing which screen it lives on. In agent-native software, you say what you want done, and finding the screen is the agent's problem because there is no screen in the way.
What it requires
| Requirement | Why an agent needs it |
|---|---|
| Every operation is a command or API call | A step that exists only as a switch on a web page cannot be taken by an agent, so it stalls the work and returns it to a person. |
| Scoped, expiring credentials | An agent should hold the least authority that does the job, for the shortest time, and never a master key. |
| Approvals bound to the exact action | A person must be able to say yes to one specific risky request, once, without handing over standing permission. |
| Idempotent writes | Agents retry. A repeated request must not charge a card twice or create a second copy of a record. |
| Readable state and errors | An agent can diagnose logs, health and deployments if it can read them, and errors that say what to do next let it recover. |
| Documentation as a machine-readable surface | If the agent has to guess, the documentation has a bug. Plain-text docs and an OpenAPI description remove the guessing. |
What it is not
Agent-native does not mean unsupervised. The design assumption is that agents make mistakes, so the platform limits what a token can do and puts a person in front of dangerous actions. It also does not mean a particular model or product: anything that can run a command or call an HTTP API can use a platform built this way.
Where Stackap is today
Stackap Cloud has the pieces above now: commands and an HTTP API for every operation, scoped tokens, approvals tied to the exact action, idempotency keys, an OpenAPI description at /v1/openapi.json and plain-text documentation. Stackap Business is built the other way, as software people click through that also has an AI agent inside. Bringing it onto the same control plane is the work in progress, described on the automation and agents page.
Questions
Is agent-native just another word for AI-powered?
Does an agent-native platform need a special agent?
Stackap is in early access. Tell us what you run and we will reply with a straight answer about whether it fits.
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