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Mintlify & Coinbase: 80% of Docs Readers Are Now AI Agents

AI Engineer
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Why Mintlify and Coinbase Now Build Docs and APIs for AI Agents

Hahnbee Lee is co-founder and CTO of Mintlify, the Series B San Francisco company that hosts developer documentation for companies including Coinbase. Lincoln Murr is head of AI product at Coinbase. Their AI Engineer fireside chat covers what changes when the main reader of your docs and the main user of your product is an agent, not a person.

The 10% to 80% shift: The headline number is Mintlify's own tracking across all the sites it hosts. At the start of the year, Lee says, "we had around like 10% of like the viewership was agents. And now we're closer to like 80%." Human viewership hasn't fallen. Agent traffic has grown faster than the team's own internal bets predicted.

What agents care about in docs: Mintlify was founded in 2022 as a design-led company, and Lee admits it stings that agents don't see your website or your branding. What matters now is page size, because pages eat into the context window, and accuracy. When an agent hits friction while setting up a product, "it's just going to stop. It's not going to debug it." It may brute-force it for a while, but it can just as easily switch to a competitor. Lee's answer to stale docs is automation. Engineering ships faster with coding agents, so docs need automated upkeep to keep pace. Gathering related PRs, Slack decisions and context, then working them into the right place in an existing corpus, is the tedious part of technical writing that Lee thinks can be automated. Narrative and creative writing still benefit from a human.

Coinbase as an API business for agents: Murr frames AI agents and stablecoins as two inflection points arriving together, like smartphones and 4G LTE. That combination creates new products and a risk of being disintermediated. Coinbase's response is to make everything a human can do in the app available through APIs, with guardrails, because browser use raises authentication and security problems when money is involved. Murr compares it to the move from web to mobile banking, which people once called crazy.

x402 and 100 million agent transactions: Coinbase created x402, an internet-native payment standard, and has moved it into a separate foundation that Murr says is co-run and governed with Cloudflare, Stripe, Amex, Mastercard and Visa. Crypto's role, in Murr's view, is microtransactions: an agent paying a thousandth or a millionth of a cent for an API call or a paywalled page. Murr reports "around 100 million agentic transactions, actually, all happening on-chain" in the past year, mostly agents paying for APIs one call at a time instead of a human creating an account, funding it and handing over an API key. Murr's grocery-store analogy: today it's as if you had to buy a store-specific gift card and join a loyalty program before you could pay for anything.

API first, MCP and CLI on top: Asked about MCP versus CLI versus API, Murr says the API is always the foundation, with MCP adding natural-language context and a CLI adding a terminal requirement. You need all three. Lee agrees: agents speak the language of developers and are very good at Bash, so software companies should invest in APIs, which can seem old-fashioned, over front ends.

5 Takeaways on Building for AI Agent Readers and Buyers

  • Agents are now most of your docs traffic - Across Mintlify-hosted sites, agent share grew from about 10% to about 80% of views this year.
  • Docs quality means page size and accuracy - Agents ignore design, and they churn at the first friction point instead of debugging.
  • Automate docs maintenance - The research-and-update part of technical writing can be automated so docs keep pace with AI-accelerated engineering.
  • Expose the whole business through APIs - Coinbase treats agent access as a defensive move, the way banks had to go mobile.
  • Money gives agents autonomy - Per-call payments via x402 let agents buy APIs and paywalled data without a human setting up accounts first.

What Agent-First Docs Mean for Software Companies

If 80% of your docs readers are agents, documentation is no longer marketing. It is the onboarding flow for your most active users, and stale or bloated pages lose customers silently. Murr's longer bet goes further: agents with wallets could finally deliver the old DAO vision of automation at the core and humans at the edges, hiring a lawyer or an accountant to finish tasks they can't do alone. For a related view of agents as buyers, see the agentic commerce entry.