Endpoint

The first time someone told me to "hit the orders endpoint," I nodded like I knew what that meant. I did not. It sounded like a place. Turns out it kind of is.

Here's the picture. An API is the whole building. The endpoint is one specific door in it, and each door does exactly one job. You don't walk into "the API" in general. You walk to the particular door for the particular thing you want, and you knock there.

• One door for get my orders.
• A different door for create a product.
• Another for send an email.
• Another for delete a customer.

Same building, many doors, each labeled, each handling one task and nothing else.

What an endpoint actually looks like. In real life it's just a web address. Take a company's API and tack a little tail on the end:

/orders
/customers
/products

Each of those tails is a different door. /orders is the orders door. /customers is the customers door. Same building, different doors for different requests. When you see those slashes in someone's code or docs, that's all they are: labels on doors.

So when a developer says "hit the orders endpoint," they just mean: knock on the door labeled orders and ask for what's behind it. Nothing more mysterious than that.

Your AI doesn't talk to "Shopify" as one big blob either. It walks the hallway and knocks on a few specific doors, one at a time. So "email every customer who bought last week" is three knocks in a row:

1. Orders door: who bought last week?

2. Customers door: what are their email addresses?

3. Email door: send the message.

One building, many doors. The endpoint is the exact one you need.