API Tooling Didn’t Get Better. We Just Lowered Our Expectations

It is strange how little we talk about APIs now. Not because APIs matter less. They matter more than ever. Modern software is held together by APIs: SaaS products, internal platforms, mobile apps, partner integrations, automation workflows, and now AI agents calling tools over HTTP-shaped boundaries all day long. And yet the API ecosystem feels oddly quiet, almost resigned. As if the problem has already been solved. As if Postman, Swagger, a test runner, some CI glue, and a folder full of half-maintained examples are simply the natural end state. Even newer waves like GraphQL and gRPC, important as they are, never really restarted the broader API tooling conversation. They shifted some technical boundaries, but the workflow problem remained. I do not think the problem was solved. I think we just got used to the friction. The easiest API problem got dramatically better For a long time, the most visible API problem was documentation. Docs were incomplete. Docs drifted. Docs showed ideali