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Your Home Inventory Can’t Order Groceries (Yet)
Episode 3684
Published 6 days, 8 hours ago
Description
Daniel has a perfect home inventory system, but he can’t get it to reorder toilet paper automatically. The problem isn’t the inventory — it’s that supermarket APIs are locked behind B2B agreements and designed for commercial partners, not consumers. This episode explores why Tesco’s pioneering API was shut down, how Amazon’s Dash buttons solved the problem by owning the whole stack, and why the real answer in 2026 might not be an API at all. We dig into how AI agents are turning every supermarket website into an accidental, undocumented API — and why that’s both brilliant and fragile.