Emre Tezisci has a pretty good article explaining: APIs vs. SDKs: Key Differences, Use Cases, and Best Practices.

Is what you’re doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it’s probably going to be great at it. If you’re asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you’re asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.

My own thought: when people say there are writing an AI app, we’re still in a stage where that feels exotic and magical and at the cutting edge of technology. And in a way, it is. But very few people are actually creating AI, most of us are using AI. So writing an AI app is more like… writing an API app. You’re figuring out the best APIs to use, what/when to send them that yields the best results, and how to show those results to the user.

You can just rawdog a web browser for this kind of work, building some kind of repeatable way to do the POST then using the Network tab in DevTools to see what you’re sending and getting.

But there better tools. I typically think of Postman for this, and I’m sure it’s a very nice app. But it can also feel like a bit much, with a homepage full of AI talk and enterprise plans and whatnot. I mention this because I serendipitously happen to run across two new-to-me tools that seemed to fit the bill for my work:

• Hoppscotch — Browser Based & Open Source
• Yaak — Native App(s) & Open Source

I tend to prefer browser-based tools, but I went with Yaak just because then it would “just work” with my local dev environment without a proxy or anything.