The API Tooling Crisis: Why developers are abandoning Postman and its clones?
(efp.asia)
from dhruv3006@lemmy.world to programming@programming.dev on 21 May 2026 11:14
https://lemmy.world/post/47156990
from dhruv3006@lemmy.world to programming@programming.dev on 21 May 2026 11:14
https://lemmy.world/post/47156990
#programming
threaded - newest
justuse.org/curl/
So much work and investigation into a tool that is a front end for something already on your system.
But how do you collaborate?
expose a backdoor endpoint on every collaborator’s device and peruse their shell history
I just wish that they wrote more articles. Their writing style is superb. Can’t argue with this though:
I feel like people who make these arguments in earnest are simply terrible at change and lack empathy. “Works for me, so I refuse to understand why it doesn’t work for others”. It’s so conservative neckbeard and offputting.
Yes and no.
There’s a lot to be said about empathy, assumed knowledge/expertise, acquisition of knowledge/expertise, mentorship, deadlines, etc…
But on the other hand, there are psychological effects that result in people being truly blind to alternatives. It’s not that they don’t think the alternative is correct, or that they don’t want to spend mental/emotional energy on learning an alternative. It’s that they truly can’t even consider that there is an alternative until they are explicitly told to use it. That website exists for those people.
That does not really work for DX… Or collaboration. Or testing. Or documentation.
Na, that is you not reading the Frequently Asked Dumb Questions
Soooo you’re not actually arguing for cURL but for bash scripts and potentially something else.
And now you come across all the issues that come with that, like portability, the inevitable messiness of Bash (and the fact that people actually need to learn it unlike a GUI tool that uses simple JS for scripting), and you lose all the convenience of a nice UX and stuff like validation that comes with it.
In other words your argument is about as valid as people who argue that vim is the peak of IDEs and noone ever needs anything else. Which - I really hope - you realize is a bit crazy.
What is more crazy.
There are even open source tools that do the same thing.
Also, yeah, if something solves a problem, it can be worth it to pay for it even if it’s proprietary.
Lol, I know absolutely nothing about Postman but seriously suggesting Bash scripts, curl and grep as a way to test APIs is a nice way to tell people not to bother listening to your worthless opinions!
A Python script is far more reasonable.
Go back to the future:
addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/
I also use Bruno: github.com/usebruno/bruno
Our team lives in Git, our communication is happening on slack, our docs written and maintained on confluence and after some time they always drift away from the actual requests inside Postman.
So we built and open sourced Voiden a few months ago: an API tool where all that: specs, tests, context and docs are always together in the same executable plain text file (markdown). We also made this Git native so that every change is versioned and tracked just like code.
The last change we have made is to add a Runner so that one can run the files directly from the terminal and CI/CD pipelines.
here is the tool: voiden.md/download repo: github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden
welcome to try and give feedback!
That looks pretty nice. The documentation said it fears me.
That is a nice tooling. Thanks for sharing and making it. Do you think it could support oRPC?
Never had any use case for collaborating on requests, why do you use it?
When you explore an API in a team and would like to collaborate on that with somebody. If you’ve worked on any big tech API, with Oauth, and have secrets, writing a script for every request combination takes way too long. Simply pasting the URL and using the stored oauth token within the session is easy with a frontend. And it’s reusable and sharable within your team.
I see. Thanks!
TL;DR;
Enshittification
Didn’t read the article, but that’s why I abandoned it.
I don’t remember making this comment, but it was my verbatim reaction, so I very well could have.
I started using bruno for lazy gui “make a request” needs.
But for anything serious python requests is right there, so I mostly used that for testing.
I’ve taken to writing .http files which are runnable on a number of IDEs and plugins. I don’t need to know what anybody else is using to run them, they live with the code and I’m happy.
That said, I’ve seen people on QA do really cool end-to-end tests at load via very approachable scripting on Postman.
There’s lots of room for “to each their own” here.
I remember when postman used to bring little envelopes (sometimes little boxes) to people’s homes and was paid by tax money and the small amount of postal fees we paid.
justuse.org/curl/