What’s Broken in API Tooling

API tooling looks mature, but the daily workflow still feels messy. Not because sending a request is hard. curl solved that decades ago. The broken part is everything around the request: auth, environments, shared headers, chained calls, debugging, docs, tests, mocks, history, and collaboration. Most API clients still treat requests like isolated forms. Method - URL - Headers. - Body - Auth - Send. That works for one endpoint. It breaks down when the work becomes a flow: log in, extract a token, create a resource, use its ID somewhere else, test an edge case, compare the response, document the behavior, and share it with someone else. That is not a request. That is a workflow. The bigger issue is that API work often lives as app state instead of project state. Your code lives in Git. Your tests live in the repo. Your docs are Markdown. Your CI config is committed. But your API requests often live inside a separate workspace, synced through a separate cloud account, with history and…