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Product wants features. Engineering wants to fix the architecture. Neither fully understands the other''s constraints. The result is either all-features-no-quality or all-refactoring-no-shipping. The fix requires building a shared language around trade-offs, not just better processes.
Implement consumer-driven contract testing with Pact to verify that APIs and clients agree on their interface without full integration tests.
Design APIs for AI agents: structured errors, idempotency keys, verbose context, bulk operations, OpenAPI specs, token-based rate limiting, and version stability.
Design APIs clients love: sensible defaults, cursor pagination, problem details errors, rate limit headers, and deprecation lifecycle.
API-first development means designing the contract before writing code. Here''s the workflow that actually works in 2026.