I tried out Zapier Natural Language Actions API and found that it’s not particularly good for the one thing I needed it to be good at glueing together other APIs with natural language. API endpoints that are simple and straightforward are easy for large language models to generate the right inputs but more complicated (and poorly designed) like HubSpot are unusable.
This is a shame because mashing up simple APIs is trivial and the things that would relieve the most effort (like poorly designed APIs), NLA can’t do.
Maybe this gets better eventually and Zapier adds enough special handling for HubSpot. I still think this could be extraordinarily powerful if it can become the substrate for interop rather than people.
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It’s useful to think about the underlying utilities that go into running one’s life and business with the same rigor used to build something significant. Afterall, the things we rely on every day can have an outsized impact on our own performance so why not treat it that way?