[danpalmer]

This is fine at a small scale. When you're one dev or a small team you can understand the whole system and you'll benefit from this simplicity.

When you're many devs, many APIs, many resources, it really pays to have a consistent, well-defined way to do this. GraphQL is very close to what you've described, with some more defined standards. GRPC is close as well, except the serialisation format isn't JSON, it's something more optimised.

As a team grows these sorts of standards emerge from the first-pass versions anyway. These just happen to be pre-defined ones that work well with other things that you could choose to use if you wanted to.

[sagichmal]

It's fine at medium and large scale, too, as long as the service doesn't change its API very much, and/or it doesn't have too many consumers. It only breaks down when managing change becomes too difficult. IMO way way too many people opt in to the complexity of IDL-based protocols without good reason.