Why AI Agents Need Webhooks
By HookSniff Team
Engineering · Published on 2026-05-09
The AI agent ecosystem is exploding. From coding assistants to autonomous sales agents, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of acting on their own. But there is a fundamental problem: **how do agents know when something happens?**
The Polling Problem
Most AI agents today use polling — they check an API every N seconds to see if something changed. This is inefficient, wasteful, and introduces latency.
Webhooks: The Nervous System
Webhooks solve this perfectly. When an event occurs — a customer signs up, a payment fails, a CI build completes — the relevant agent gets notified instantly via a webhook.
MCP and Event Delivery
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as the standard for AI agent communication. But MCP focuses on request-response patterns. For asynchronous events, webhooks remain the best mechanism.
How HookSniff Enables Agent Workflows
- **Instant delivery** — Sub-second latency for time-sensitive agent decisions
- **FIFO ordering** — Agents process events in the correct sequence
- **Schema validation** — Ensure agents receive well-structured data
- **Dead letter queue** — Never lose an event, even if the agent is temporarily down
The Future
As agents become more autonomous, the demand for reliable event delivery will only grow. Webhooks are not just a developer tool — they are the connective tissue of the AI agent ecosystem.