Methods, systems, and computer program products for application-specific, real-time modification of application programming interface behavior. Meaning is derived from analysis of human-readable intelligence found in a collaboration object of a content management system. The meaning is used to inform the behavior of an application programming interface that is exposed to applications that interface with the content management system. The content management system invokes a range of analysis modules that examine the human-intelligible contents of a requested collaboration object to determine meaning from the human-intelligible contents. Content-derived tags are emitted based on the analysis. When the application invokes an entry point of the API, a set of content-derived tags are associated with the application, and the occurrence and/or values of the content-derived tags are then used in rules. The results of evaluation of the rules determine how the API will respond to the application.