Not one of the downvoters, but I'd guess it's because this is only true with HATEOAS which is the part that 99% of teams ignore when implementing "REST" APIs. The downvoters may not have even known that's what you were talking about. When people say REST they almost never mean HATEOAS even though they were explicitly intended to go together. Today "REST" just means "we'll occasionally use a verb other than GET and POST, and sometimes we'll put an argument in the path instead of the query string" and sometimes not even that much. If you're really doing RPC and calling it REST, then you need something to document all the endpoints because the endpoints are no longer self-documenting.
But that is roughly the point here. If we still used REST we wouldn't need swagger, openapi, graphql (for documentation at least, it has other benefits), etc.
We solved the problem of discovery and documentation between machines decades ago. LLMs can and should be using that today instead of us reinventing bandaids yet again.
I didn't downvote, but I'm thinking that you need endpoint discovery, bucket types, etc. Sure you could write a 1 page document describing the buckets at the root level, the relationships of the objects, etc., but why not let swagger do that for you at compile time?
I'm talking about actual REST here though, not RPC. Endpoint discover and typed schemas are core pieces of REST, we don't need Swagger or similar to fill in those gaps.
REST is self documenting.
Edit: for down voters, I'd be curious why.
Not one of the downvoters, but I'd guess it's because this is only true with HATEOAS which is the part that 99% of teams ignore when implementing "REST" APIs. The downvoters may not have even known that's what you were talking about. When people say REST they almost never mean HATEOAS even though they were explicitly intended to go together. Today "REST" just means "we'll occasionally use a verb other than GET and POST, and sometimes we'll put an argument in the path instead of the query string" and sometimes not even that much. If you're really doing RPC and calling it REST, then you need something to document all the endpoints because the endpoints are no longer self-documenting.
HATEOAS won't give you the basic nouns on which to work with
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But that is roughly the point here. If we still used REST we wouldn't need swagger, openapi, graphql (for documentation at least, it has other benefits), etc.
We solved the problem of discovery and documentation between machines decades ago. LLMs can and should be using that today instead of us reinventing bandaids yet again.
Self documenting, but mainly to the architect who put ‘RESTful’ in the slide deck and called the documentation done.
I didn't downvote, but I'm thinking that you need endpoint discovery, bucket types, etc. Sure you could write a 1 page document describing the buckets at the root level, the relationships of the objects, etc., but why not let swagger do that for you at compile time?
I'm talking about actual REST here though, not RPC. Endpoint discover and typed schemas are core pieces of REST, we don't need Swagger or similar to fill in those gaps.