[dragonwriter]

> If you hit an endpoint and get a 404... did you do it wrong? Is my documentation outdated?

Sure, you might want information in addition to that provided by the status code. And, again, rather than reinventing the wheel with some ad hoc mechanism, you can follow the HTTP spec for a solution: almost all HTTP status codes support a response body to communicate additional detail.

> Instead, I'd change the default from 404 to 501.

5xx errors indicate server problems, not request problems. If you wanted a different status code for “that path isn't structured in a way I understand” vs “I understand how I would look up something with that path but can't find it“, 400 or 421 for the former would be better than anything that is not a 4xx since they each (1) are in the correct class and reports a client error, and (2) have a definition which arguably fits the scenario, even if 404 arguably fits better.

[inanutshellus]

I recalled there was a "not found" response and used it whilst spitballing the response above, but you're absolutely correct. 400 (Bad Request) and 421 (Misdirected Request), or even 409 (Conflict) -- as another poster mentioned -- would be great responses in that scenario

The main "issue" is that 404 is the normalized response for web servers when an endpoint doesn't exist. So it feels like one is breaking the established paradigm by using something else, but I think it's absolutely worth doing.

Certainly a bigger fan of defaulting to returning a 409 than making my API consumers parse all my response bodies.