Definition
Plain language
The most common style for letting two web services talk to each other.
As stated in the literature
Representational State Transfer API — a web service interface using HTTP verbs over stateless resource-oriented endpoints with JSON payloads.
Also called: REST
Why it matters: REST is the lingua franca of web services, so any agent that wants to act in the real world ends up speaking it constantly.
For example, an agent can fetch a user's recent emails by sending an HTTP GET to `/v1/messages` and parsing the JSON it receives back.
Heard on the show
“The training code, the agent harness, the evaluation pipeline — they all just talk to a small REST API.”Episode 047 — When Agent Benchmarks Lie: The Harness Problem in Open-Source AI