speakeasy VS http-spec

I’ve built conviction that code generation only gets useful in the long term when it is entirely deterministic, or filtered through humans. Otherwise it is almost always technical debt. Hence LLM code generation products are a cool toy, but no sensible teams will use them without an amazing “Day 2” workflow.

As an example, in my day job (https://speakeasyapi.dev), we sell code generation products using the OpenAPI specification to generate downstream artefacts (language SDKs, terraform providers, markdown documentation). The determinism makes it useful — API updates propagate continuously from server code, to specifications, then to the SDKs / providers / docs site. There are no breaking changes because the pipeline is deterministic and humans are in control of the API at the start. The code generation itself is just a means to an end : removing boilerplate effort and language differences by driving it from a source of truth (server api routes/types). Continuously generated, it is not debt.

We’ve put a lot of effort into trying to make an LLM agent useful in this context. However giving them control of generated code directly means it’s hard to keep the “no breaking changes”, and “consistency” restrictions that’s needed to make code generation useful.

The trick we’ve landed on to get utility out of an LLM in a code generation task, is to restrict it to manipulating a strictly typed interface document, such that it can only do non-breaking things to code (e.g. adjust comments / descriptions / examples) by making changes through this interface.

In my mind the analagous behaviour would be if the golang checksum database added in license terms that stated "you need to abide by a BSL to use data from this service". What that actually would mean is so nebulous that it feels threatening.

[0] Source: https://registry.terraform.io/v1/providers/airbytehq/airbyte...

[1] Source: https://github.com/airbytehq/terraform-provider-airbyte/tree... gzipped : ~300 resources, ~300 data sources

(NB: in airbyte's case the TF Provider was generated from a ~150Kb OpenAPI spec via https://speakeasyapi.dev: implying docs could be compressed even more)

I'm working on a company https://speakeasyapi.dev/ with the goal helping companies in this ecosystem get great production quality client sdks, terraform providers, cli(s) and all the developer surfaces you may want supported for our API. We also manage the spec and publishing workflow for you so all you have to do is build your API and we'll do the rest.

Feel free to email me at [email protected] or join our slack (https://join.slack.com/t/speakeasy-dev/shared_invite/zt-1cwb...) . We're in open beta and working with a few great companies already and we'd be happy for you to try out the platform for free!

Hi all I am a founding engineer for a API Experience company called Speakeasy - speakeasyapi.dev and we have recently released a Client SDK Generator for APIs using OpenAPI 3.0.X documents (soon to support 3.1). The generator will generate idiomatic Golang SDKs (along with other languages) that feel natural to use, easy to mock, and just work. The generator is free to use and can be run via a standalone golang built CLI with no external dependencies that can be easily installed as a binary or via homebrew (mac & linux). Check it out here https://github.com/speakeasy-api/speakeasy. If you have any questions or want to get in touch to see how Speakeasy can help you improve your APIs, just let me know!

The generator has been battle tested on thousands of APIs and we are sharing the results in our github repo. If you want to try it out on your own, download the CLI or brew install and get started in minutes:

However, we do not need to write the specification by hand, as there are GUI editors to perform that task. We show a couple of examples of Spotlight, which provides an easy-to-use interface:

We use Stoplight Studio https://stoplight.io/ to design APIs, one of the advantages of Stoplight Studio is the Visual interface, it generates OpenAPI specs from the design and supports OpenAPI v3, allowing users to create, edit, and view API designs using the OpenAPI standard.

I'm sorry, but you have completely misunderstood the purpose of Open API.

It is not a specification to define your business logic classes and objects -- either client or server side. Its goal is to define the interface of an API, and to provide a single source of truth that requests and responses can be validated against. It contains everything you need to know to make requests to an API; code generation is nice to have (and I use it myself, but mainly on the server side, for routing and validation), but not something required or expected from OpenAPI

For what it's worth, my personal preferred workflow to build an API is as follows:

1. Build the OpenAPI spec first. A smaller spec could easily be done by hand, but I prefer using a design tool like Stoplight [0]; it has the best Web-based OpenAPI (and JSON Schema) editor I have encountered, and integrates with git nearly flawlessly.

2. Use an automated tool to generate the API code implementation. Again, a static generation tool such as datamodel-code-generator [1] (which generates Pydantic models) would suffice, but for Python I prefer the dynamic request routing and validation provided by pyapi-server [2].

3. Finally, I use automated testing tools such as schemathesis [3] to test the implementation against the specification.

[0] https://stoplight.io/

[1] https://koxudaxi.github.io/datamodel-code-generator/

[2] https://pyapi-server.readthedocs.io

[3] https://schemathesis.readthedocs.io

One of the best tools out there for API design and governance https://stoplight.io/ you can also use the open source tool (also from Stoplight) called Spectral https://stoplight.io/open-source/spectral

Stoplight is a platform for designing, documenting, and testing APIs. Its "Mocks" feature allows you to create mock versions of your API for testing and development purposes. In addition to the mock feature, Stoplight also includes tools for API design, documentation, and testing, making it a comprehensive platform for API development.

Stoplight

JSON visualizer JSON validator YAML validator Collaborative Design & Documentation for APIs