In the context of computer programming, an API is just a set of rules to help you use other software tools.

Example:

“High-level” programming languages like Python or JavaScript are actually written in C/C++ under the hood.

For you to write the Python print function in one line, someone else wrote a hundred lines of C code for this.

But you don’t need to know that.

You just need to know the rules, like the function name, input, and output.

The print functions, and other built-in functions and modules are APIs for you to use Python.

Later on, as web development becomes more popular, the term API is most often used to describe web APIs.

Web APIs are rules to communicate with other web services.

Here’s an example.

If you want to add a chatbot to your app, you can just use OpenAI's models through an API.

Again, you don’t need to know how they train their model or anything about machine learning.

You just need to know the rules.

In web API, the rules are knowing the data to send, where you should send it, and the response data, etc.

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