Lesson 965 of 2116
API Design Review With AI: Catching the Decisions You'll Regret in 18 Months
API decisions are hard to undo. AI can review API designs against established patterns, surface forward-compatibility risks, and identify the decisions that look fine now but will hurt in production.
Lesson map
What this lesson covers
Learning path
The main moves in order
- 1The premise
- 2API design
- 3REST
- 4GraphQL
Concept cluster
Terms to connect while reading
Section 1
The premise
API design decisions compound; AI surfaces the decisions that look fine now but will be expensive to reverse later.
What AI does well here
- Compare proposed designs against established patterns (REST conventions, GraphQL best practices)
- Surface forward-compatibility risks (rigid pagination, anemic versioning, fragile error formats)
- Identify decisions that look fine in v1 but will hurt by v3
- Generate the deprecation strategy for the API surface area
What AI cannot do
- Substitute for the architect's judgment about the system's evolution
- Catch every design issue (some only appear with real consumers)
- Replace the user research that should inform API design
Key terms in this lesson
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