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by ventana 17 days ago
I don't like the idea of making APIs effectively unusable for a human developer. We might not write a lot of code anymore, but getting rid of defaults and asking agents to pass all possible values explicitly makes it impossible to quickly debug the API call (e.g. with curl or something).

It's similar to HTTP/1: there are a lot of headers in the protocol, but you can still use nc or openssl s_client and type the request manually; you probably only need Host: and Content-Type:, maybe Content-Length:, and it will work. I don't normally write HTTP requests in the terminal, but I know I can do it if I need. It's better to keep it this way, I think.

Same with APIs.

1 comments

Also, any competent developer still writes tons of code. The "agentic era" is completely overblown.
I'll say this: as a very competent engineer I have gone weeks at a time without handwriting a single line of code in the past few months. It is where the industry is going.
Where do you see this? I’ve not found this to be true since at least Xmas.