What problem does it solve?
Designing APIs often becomes inconsistent, brittle, and hard to evolve; this guide helps teams define clear contracts, predictable error handling, and scalable pagination and versioning so clients and servers can be developed in parallel.
Core Features & Use Cases
- REST & HTTP semantics: Resource naming, method usage, idempotency, and status code guidance for predictable client behavior.
- Error shaping & observability: RFC 7807 problem details, stable error codes, and logging practices to avoid leaking internals while enabling debuggability.
- Pagination, versioning & auth: Offset and cursor pagination patterns, URL and header versioning strategies, bearer/JWT and API key practices, rate limiting and CORS rules.
- OpenAPI and GraphQL readiness: Spec-first workflows, OpenAPI components and tooling, GraphQL schema patterns, connection pagination, and DataLoader guidance for N+1 problems.
Quick Start
Use the api-design skill to produce an OpenAPI v3 specification for an orders service that includes resource paths, RFC 7807 error responses, cursor pagination, bearer authentication, and a clear versioning scheme.