Web basics

API

A defined way for one piece of software to ask another to do something.

An API (Application Programming Interface) is the contract that lets your code talk to someone else's code without knowing how it works inside. When you want to charge a card, you don't build a bank — you call Stripe's API and it handles the money. As a vibe coder, most of what you build is really gluing APIs together, so 'is there an API for that?' is often the first question worth asking before you write any logic yourself.