cynically true :)

yes thats a good idea, we actually made an FAQ that sits with our docs…I want to monitor to see if this helps people navigate some of these questions:)

hm…great points, thanks for taking the time to answer.

From the perspective of a user, why would they care about development speed?

Yes, the tool is already developed but it will continue evolving right? I mean, we almost make 2-3 releases every month since we shipped the first version and then open sourced. So the speed still counts. Plus, the users who create the tickets and expect them to be tackled are actually developers themselves. So yeah, the ability to deliver (at a good pace) to these folks matters a lot.

However - YES, if at some point the tool is at a state that the speed becomes less meaningful or useful, then indeed a change might be needed?

As for platform consistency, again, why would the user care?

Yes, since our users are Dev (and QA) folks, we thought that yeah, maybe someone could have different systems for work vs home vs side project (as you said). But another aspect that we thought is teams and collaboration. We didn’t want to have a scenario in which a team can not use it before some of the devs are using macs, others linux vs the QA folks using windows etc.

What I’m getting at is that the concerns of developers will not always be equally concerning to users.

Thats the heart of the discussion:) I guess because our users are also developers. :)

nice metaphor:) but unlike a car, these Electron processes aren’t slowly eating your tires or draining your oil. Maybe a better metaphor would be that the car you rent comes with a few extra cup holders you that you didn’t ask for? :)

thanks! well, the feedback and the questions did not come from lemmy per se but in general. And yes, I agree with you. People do have strong opinions and this is more a question for me - as I often feel that perhaps there is some “better” way to explain or show the impact of the decision. (and explain the trade off). But I think that ultimately you are saying one simple (but very important) thing: that you can not please everyone :)

Yeah, honestly, sometimes I feel frustrated trying to explain it, because I know some people will never be satisfied. I just want to be transparent about the tradeoffs and let people SEE the actual usage (even if it will indeed not convince everyone).

we are indeed looking at the docs again. To begin with we focused on the tool itself so some of the examples that you see can indeed be worth revisiting and re writing. :) But I hope you can focus and zoom in to the tool itself and see how this can help you with your API workflows.

wow wow thanks! please spread the word!

hey - thats great :) Happy you downloaded it :) curious to hear your feedback - I will send you a discord link as a message so its not seen as spamming.

Let me see if I understand your question: you mean how Voiden would look when its more mature?

What I am most excited about is that Voiden already does a few things differently from most API tools. Reusable blocks, plain-text everything, and the ability to go from testing to docs to publishing from a single source are already working and shaping how teams can work in a more consistent way.

There is still a lot ahead (for example I want to see what kind of plugins people come up with for the tool, or how AI will eventually play a bigger role) but the principles of Voiden (reusability, composability, plain text, collaboration through git, single source of truth etc.) are the ideas I believe will define and set a new tone/standard of how API tools should be.

I thought no one would ask :) just open sourced it a few weeks ago. But I promise I will never pay someone to praise it pretending to be a developer.

https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden

haha I dont know how to take this

haha indeed - modern has this “blinking lights” connotation. something that is shiny.

True story - once, in primary school, I went to a halloween party, where all the boys were dressed as batman and all the girls as macarena (guess my age). The host of the party was maybe the only one not dressed as batman.

He was wearing some weird jell in the hair, like a punk kind of thing, with a lot of strass, stars all over his body, some heart or thunder shaped big mirror glasses, a shiny jacket and the best looking blue mocasines I have ever seen. He also had a big radio antenna (??) coming through his nylon electric yellow vest.

I asked him: what are you dressed as? and he replied: “Modern”.

true :) I heard this actually even from ex insomnia folks - the direction could have been much different.

• bruno does have a paywall last time I checked :) but the point is not to have tool debates :) my main point is around overall philosophies and ways that new things are like older things with a small twist.

yes, sorry for the confusion - yes I mean API Client tool - postman, insomnia etc. etc.

from where?

this is the “joke”. that every API client calls themseleves modern without this essentially meaning much.

and certainly not, I dont mean Postman. But this is the easy answer. What I also mean is that many of the tools that came as a response to Postman being “old fashioned” are basically mimicking the same things or principles with a few things here and there.

so everything is like “postman but with a better XYZ feature” or “Postman but open source”…

Apologies…missed that. Yeah this is what we are currently working on - part of the next release actually :)

I actually agree with most of your premise.

Voiden is not coming from “people are too scared of the terminal, let’s save them with buttons.” It comes from almost the opposite direction. A lot of us are terminal people too. The problem is not that curl, hurl, scripts, OpenAPI, or plain code are bad. The problem is that API work tends to get fragmented across too many places once it becomes real.

You have raw requests in one place, auth logic in another, docs somewhere else, examples in Slack, test cases somewhere else again, and then different teams consuming different versions of what is supposedly the same API. That’s the mess we care about.

So the goal with Voiden is not to replace power-user workflows but to give them a better structure, while also making that same source of truth usable by the rest of the team, including people who are not living in the terminal all day, or simply have different preferences.

That is also why composability matters so much to us. Reusable headers, auth, query params, payload fragments, shared blocks, documentation alongside execution , not because curl cannot do requests, but mainly because nobody wants to maintain the same slightly different request 100 times across scripts, docs, and collections.

And on the “UI tools become dead ends” point: yes, that is the trap we are trying to avoid. We do not want a bespoke black-box UI where if there is no button, you are stuck. The idea is to have one source of truth that can still work for power users, can be versioned in Git, can be shared, can be documented properly, and can evolve into automation/CLI/agent workflows as well.

So from my side it is not “UI versus terminal.” That debate is honestly a bit too small. What if we reframe this to: “Can we have one composable, reviewable, reusable representation of API work that serves both the terminal-native people and the wider team without duplicating everything across five tools?”

That is basically the whole bet.

So yeah, I get the skepticism. I have it too. The world does not need another glossy “API client” that turns into a toy the moment you step outside the happy path.

The point of Voiden is precisely to avoid that fate. I am sure you will see how radically different Voiden’s take is, if you just give it a spin for a few mins. In a world full of postman clones - we want Voiden to really stand out with a different approach to api tooling. :)

yes :) welcome to try