Wade Foster on how Zapier's SDK turns Claude Code and Cursor into 9,000-tool automation engines

Zapier SDK

Zapier's most immediate news is the launch of its SDK, which lets users install Zapier directly inside coding agents like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex. From there, it connects automations across all 9,000 of Zapier's supported tools without leaving the coding environment. Foster says he used it himself, as a non-engineer, to build an AI chief of staff that runs in the background on top of Microsoft Teams.

Individual leverage vs. institutional productivity

The more substantive point Foster makes is about where AI productivity gains actually land. 100% of Zapier's employees use AI daily, but Foster is candid that individual productivity is not the same as company-wide productivity. Individuals are more productive; whether the institution is more productive is "a lot harder to say yes to."

His explanation is structural. When code was expensive, companies built elaborate upfront processes to figure out what to build, because choosing wrong was costly. When code is cheap, those processes become friction rather than protection, and redesigning around that requires rethinking where humans sit in the workflow entirely.

The marketing team hackathon illustrates the individual-gains side: 50 people, one week, 80-plus new internal tools, mostly dashboards that previously required SQL skills marketers didn't have. Campaigns that used to take days of analysis now take under an hour.

“We launched our Zapier SDK last week. You can install it inside of Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, any coding agent you might use. It hooks into all 9,000 different tools. A hundred percent of our employees are using AI daily. But if you were to ask me is the company more productive institutionally — a lot harder to say yes to that.”

Company brain

To manage the volume problem that comes with remote-first, always-documented work, Zapier built what Foster calls a "company brain" with layered structure. A curated top layer holds canonical company strategy, values, and ideal customer profile, maintained by Foster and a small group. Teams maintain their own equivalent layer below that. Individual employees have private supplements. When anyone pulls in a meeting transcript or Slack thread, it gets evaluated against that curated backdrop rather than dumped into an unfiltered context window.

Vibe coding and Zapier's competitive position

On why someone should use Zapier instead of vibe-coding a one-off automation, Foster's argument is maintenance and security. Vibe-coded scripts break when APIs change; Zapier handles that upkeep across 9,000 integrations. More pointedly, many vibe-coding tools ask users to paste API keys into plain text files that can end up on GitHub. Zapier manages authentication in a controlled environment.

Agents, workflows, and what customers actually want

Foster says the terminology debate between workflows, agentic workflows, and full agents is largely academic from a customer perspective. Zapier has a slide that explains the differences, but in practice customers arrive with a problem and want it solved. Deterministic and agentic approaches have different tradeoffs, and teams building production systems eventually need to understand them, but most customers aren't there yet.

Autonomous companies

On the timeline for fully autonomous businesses, Foster thinks narrow, well-defined tasks are close, pointing to a former Zapier employee, Nat Eliason, who built an operation using AI agents to sell courses with minimal human involvement. But he's skeptical of the zero-person company as a durable phenomenon. If an autonomous business works, someone will clone it and compete the margins down. And if a business is successful enough to be worth running, there's always an economic incentive for a human to spend at least an hour a week on it.