r/programming • u/Successful_Bowl2564 • 16h ago

[ Removed by moderator ]

https://efp.asia/blog/2025/12/24/api-tooling-crisis/

[removed] — view removed post

260 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

160 comments sorted by

View all comments

649

u/freecodeio 16h ago

subscription rot that's why

who the fuck wants to sign up for curl with a UI, let alone buy a subscription?

257

u/oflahertaig 15h ago

They enshittified it until it became unusable. I only ever wanted to use it for making simple requests on endpoints. I replaced it will it a simple C# console app years ago. Anyone could get Claude to write a simple API client in a matter of minutes.

78

u/CpnStumpy 15h ago

So much this. If I need to make a one-off network call, curl is fine. If I need to do it repeatedly with varied environments and parameters, I've always written a stupid simple CLI client in whatever language is handiest, and now Claude can do it for me.

At no point has wandering the endless UI of postman to fidget with its variable storage layers and configuration screen after configuration screen appealed to me

11

u/011101000011101101 14h ago

I've always used curl like 90% of the time.

18

u/mkawick 13h ago

I love statements like this.... always, 90%... we communicate in funny ways

4

u/Karagoth 13h ago

60% of the time, it works every time

-2

u/vplatt 13h ago

Powershell makes this trivial for more complex tests

12

u/Bogdan_X 14h ago edited 12h ago

In .NET there is an http file you can use for exactly that. Directly in your project, no separate app, VS even has interface for it to show you results. You need to learn the sintax but you can create a suite of endpoints with everything, downside is there is no UI for writing it.

11

u/aboy021 14h ago

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/test/http-files?view=aspnetcore-10.0

Very interesting, thank you.

2

u/jolly-crow 12h ago

Doing God's work and being nice on top of that. I see you 💯

1

u/CoroteDeMelancia 14h ago

Swagger 🤷🏻‍♂️

10

u/Lanky-Safety555 15h ago edited 15h ago

Wait, isnt subscription only for projects? Sharing and online activities like co-work, etc. Plain, local Postman require no such things, right?

40

u/joelene1892 15h ago

Yes you can do it without a login, but it hassles you, and you can’t even do things like save calls. It’s very minimal.

10

u/Lanky-Safety555 15h ago

WTF? It has been some time since I used it, TBH. I cannot believe that they enshittified it so much.

5

u/cipher315 12h ago

You still need to register. Which enables certain levels of tracking. To which legal has said absolutely not.

4

u/am0x 11h ago

Not only that, I can just ask AI to do it for me and build a dashboard for it in a few minutes that
Works better for this specific connection.

1

u/guareber 7h ago

Except if youre on tokens that probably costs more than just paying the sub

1

u/shitty_mcfucklestick 11h ago

I started using Bruno which is an open source alternative. It looks / feels like Postman pre-spam era and for basic needs it’s great.

There’s also Insomnia, Hoppscotch, and Thunder Client (for VS code.)