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pants2 2 days ago [-]
It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
swatcoder 2 days ago [-]
> for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.
That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc
We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.
AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
We'll see how it goes.
mifydev 2 days ago [-]
I miss the UNIX-y movement so much :(
antod 2 days ago [-]
Yeah. The plucky rebels pretty much won against the evil empire, but the forces of darkness weren't completely beaten. They regrouped and then repurposed the rebels tools against them. The might of venture capital, big tech, SaaS, hyperscalers and AI was too much. The rebels weren't decisively beaten so much as eventually eroded out of any real significance.
Vaushite 2 days ago [-]
It helps that the rebels donated copies of all their equipment to the dark forces.
satvikpendem 2 days ago [-]
MIT and other non copy left licenses were a mistake. In the 2000s and 2010s people were so concerned with usage and GitHub stars of their OSS that they just gave everything away to corporations and now don't have the right to complain anymore.
brians 1 days ago [-]
Can you point at projects that got abused that way? I see plenty of things that got written by corps or by conglomerates, many of which landed with Apache. And I see lots of copyleft software that pulls whole systems with it.
What’s something that was released as MIT but, had it been GPL2, would have seeded a community?
Vaushite 12 hours ago [-]
Mostly it's not stuff that would've had a community if it was GPL - it's stuff that would've had a community either way, then Amazon took it and made it proprietary and took the community too.
hkt 1 days ago [-]
In fairness, it is easier to point out has-beens than never-weres.
eagleal 1 days ago [-]
Eh, I don't think Openai and Anthropic trained with only MIT licensed copy.
ethbr1 1 days ago [-]
Fair, there is the Uber model of 'When a founder does it, it's not illegal.'
oblio 1 days ago [-]
What do you mean? GPL licenses aren't truly free! They limit the right of corporations to abuse users! That can't be right! Better to use another license on the off chance you'll win the VC lottery.
Vaushite 12 hours ago [-]
If it's all your own work, or all yours except for a trivial amount (this is 99% of projects) you can always change the license later.
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
I generally agree with fighting corporate abuse, though IMO, GPLv3's anti-tivoization clause is kind of misguided. It may stop locked-down hardware makers from using your software, but it doesn't stop the hardware from being locked-down in the first place.
We have evidence that any hardware maker that would open up their hardware will do it already (see: reMarkable, Ubiquiti offering SSH root access). If you try to fight that battle by holding software from them, you only lose them as a contributor as they make their own, which is worse for everyone.
ThrowawayR2 2 days ago [-]
Like, what? Solaris/SunOS, DEC Ultrix/Tru64, AIX, HP-UX, Xenix, etc., all with big bad monopolist AT&T's UNIX as their grandpappy. UNIX was corporate to the hilt.
jasomill 2 days ago [-]
Corporate, sure, but painting DEC, (old) HP, and Sun with the same brush as AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft just because they sold proprietary, but generally well-documented and reliable hardware and software at whatever prices the market would bear seems unfair.
ctmlr 1 days ago [-]
Miss? Linux won the war and there is more open source software than ever before, now with language models here I think the best has yet to come.
zaik 2 days ago [-]
It's not dead??
conductr 2 days ago [-]
It’s as dead as rock and roll
rnd0 2 days ago [-]
but the heart of GNU is still beating!
kyleee 2 days ago [-]
Rock vive no muere
bigyabai 2 days ago [-]
UNIX is, UNIX-y stuff isn't.
cnity 2 days ago [-]
You are good at writing. Thanks for this.
oytmeal 2 days ago [-]
Agree... I scrolled back up from the last of the comments just to say this.
alias_neo 1 days ago [-]
Also my first thought upon reading this.
godelmachine 2 days ago [-]
Yes, this dude is really good at writing.
krazydad 2 days ago [-]
Very well written reply that voices something I knew but couldn’t quite articulate.
kraag22 1 days ago [-]
I was 100% sure, you are joking. Like they raised gazilion $ and have 100.000 employees. But when I checked, it is actually correct. WTF - what are the hundreds of people doing there? :)
prcrstntr 23 hours ago [-]
Destroy everyone else's moat while keeping theirs safe. Whether it's a good tradeoff only time will tell.
agorabinary 2 days ago [-]
Articulate and well spoken - I hope that through threads like these that especially tech newcomers discover that there are alternatives to the YC founder mentality of "growth at all costs". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway? Build something that respects your users and you can see yourself working on for 30 years, living comfortably and in moderation.
A minor tweak to The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman[1]:
The venture capitalist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”
>You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway?
Because then I can guarantee access to food/shelter/healthcare for my kids if me or their mom or one of them were to become incapacitated in some way.
prmoustache 1 days ago [-]
Shouldn't that be the purpose of insurances?
Also I am paying taxes for that and am glad of paying it for whoever has the need to instead of them or me having to setup a gofundme campaign.
I'd say voting for the right candidates is better than a system where a few of apparently lucky people can achieve that while in fact they are completely losing their mind in the process and leaving in constant stress
(if my observation of founders and so called successful tech bros is correct)
lotsofpulp 1 days ago [-]
There is zero chance the federal US government has the legislators needed to pass a sufficient safety net during the years my kids depend on me.
roncesvalles 1 days ago [-]
Eh. Human children are hardy and can figure their way out if shit really hits the fan.
You can't make it your life objective to guard against the 0.01% risk of your children becoming orphaned before 18. Just buy term insurance if anything.
lotsofpulp 1 days ago [-]
My 4 year old with cancer is not figuring their “way out”, nor is my 7 year old. We are down to a 1 income household, which is fine because we earn high incomes and work from home, so we can still split up and take care of each kid while being able to pay for health insurance and out of pocket maximums.
Insuring against death and orphaned kids is cheap and easy. Insuring against long term disability is not.
If you are a high earner in the US, you can make it your objective and live a far less stressful life because saving a few million is possible.
walt_grata 1 days ago [-]
Or we can prioritize single payer and ubi along with other social safety nets to try to ensure its there for anyone who needs it and not those lucky enough to win the capitalism lottery
lotsofpulp 1 days ago [-]
I play the game with the rules that are, not how I wish them to be. I’m betting if and when the federal US legislature gets around to passing those safety nets, my kids will be grown up and independent.
hluska 1 days ago [-]
Back in my day, we had enough taste not to try to turn a person’s child’s cancer diagnosis into a chance to make a political point. Be a better person - you’re talking to an actual human people; writing something this callous is totally fucked up
Have some basic human respect.
johnnyanmac 2 days ago [-]
>". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway?
Well, living on the other side of the pond: I get shuffled around and laid off every few years in the game industry and any savings I had got obliterated surviving in this not-recession as everyone around me gaslights me into telling me that "the economy is fine", while doing regular layoffs in nearly all sectors. And it's not like I have some sort of high respect for my craft by those who enjoy it either.
There's definitely a temptation to just sell out, find a huge buyout, and get out of the rat race so I can tinker to my heart's content on stuff I want to make. Not what "sells" or what some director wanted after 20 filters of HR, "focus groups, and other sales people get their hands on it. What integrity am I truly keeping in the former situation?
Of course, all this assumes I have the opportunity to sell out. Someone at that point is more than likely someone who was already in a trajectory to defy the typical 9-5 40 hour grind to begin with.
hluska 1 days ago [-]
If you actually believe this, why are you linking to a website that solicits subscriptions?
terribleperson 2 days ago [-]
I'm already enjoying the second version. I just hope we get to keep it.
guitarlimeo 2 days ago [-]
Well put, hopefully it's the latter version.
roncesvalles 1 days ago [-]
It's not a founder mentality as much as a VC mentality. Founders just realized that VCs are dumb rubes with too much money and easy to grift.
If you could raise $200 million with your stupid indie project and proceed to enrich yourself by 7-8 figures, why wouldn't you?
I think the greed percolates down from the VCs. And if you really trace it all the way, it's the ubiquity of index funds. The whole game is to get big enough to IPO and get into VTI's index. Then it's just free money from thereon out.
promano 20 hours ago [-]
Hoarders can get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.
red-iron-pine 23 hours ago [-]
that's a lot of words to say "greed"
cluckindan 2 days ago [-]
Enshittification and private equity are synonymous. Strange that people are still surprised by this.
abirch 2 days ago [-]
Perpetual growth at all costs. No idea what's so bad about a mature stable product/company
kulahan 2 days ago [-]
It’s basically wondering why your sales aren’t going up when there are still customers to be found. Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die, so one would assume you grow or fade, unless customers just like… stop buying things in a category for some reason (maybe a superior category was invented?)
The problem isn’t infinite growth in a still-growing world, it’s exactly what you posted here: Growth at all costs. The pendulum has swung too hard in favor of growth over stability. This is great for shareholders (read:everyone in America who wants to realistically retire one day) but bad for workers (read: everyone in America, regardless of whether or not they want to retire one day).
prmoustache 1 days ago [-]
> Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die, so one would assume you grow or fade, unless customers just like… stop buying things in a category for some reason
My own observation is that old people tend to spend less shit on silly things, compulsive purchases and focus on the essential. With an ageing global population I don't think one can expect infinite growth unless the category of services is focused on an older population.
Also society change and some stuff that is needed now won't be needed tomorrow. I don't think there is anything wrong with a shrinking market as long as it is gradual and slow enough that it lets people working for affected companies involved to retire and/or move.
cluckindan 2 days ago [-]
Growth will stop when nobody can buy.
imtringued 1 days ago [-]
"Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die"
Not true.
kulahan 1 days ago [-]
That people are born every day, or that global population has increased?
abirch 1 days ago [-]
I think the parent is saying the population for a given market.
kulahan 20 hours ago [-]
Yes I know, and I’m purposely not giving it time because it’s a modification of the argument I’m making. As such, I’m giving him a choice between the two things I actually said and actually meant to keep the conversation on track.
If he wants to go and divide the stock market up between international and non-international companies to keep score for his own purposes, he is welcome, but it’s unrelated to the conversation he entered.
bell-cot 2 days ago [-]
Late-stage capitalism is addicted to ever-increasing quantities of money.
It'd be nice to imagine our society surviving our ruling classes' addiction, but I would not bet on that.
(You might read some essays by recovered addicts to get a sense of the monomania of it, and why they wouldn't about things like "mature" and "stable".)
m0llusk 2 days ago [-]
Capitalism is a system that needs to be controlled. Setting the kitchen on fire is not late stage food preparation. Crashing a car because you drove fast on bald tires is not late stage vehicular mobility.
latentsea 1 days ago [-]
Yes, those sound more like "too late" stage.
rafram 2 days ago [-]
I don't think Postman has any PE connections.
drBonkers 2 days ago [-]
Wikipedia states Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity.
Absolutely not what people mean when they say "private equity."
Vaushite 2 days ago [-]
Enshittification and capitalism are synonymous. There's no other magical form of equity that's any better. Steam's an oft cited counterexample but Steam is in enshittification stage 2 (once you have the users, be good to vendors to develop total platform lock-in).
cj9 2 days ago [-]
I find it silly that we cite examples at all when it's a sample size of one and hasn't stood the test of time. Without the appropriate legal instruments existing within this system to ensure companies follow a specific founders vision when they retire/die, practically everything is bound to the same road. It either rots from the inside or gets taken over by force.
mschuster91 2 days ago [-]
> AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
I got out of IT partially because I could see the writing on the wall. The "load bearing Excel sheet" is one thing, manageable if you could catch the person who wrote it in time before they depart or die and know your way around Excel - there's only so many ways to achieve a desired goal (unless the author used VBA, at which point all bets are off, and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet).
But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure (i.e. isn't hackable in a few seconds by anyone who manages to compromise some dingus's laptop? Oh hell no. I'm outta there, I'm too old for this crap.
robotnikman 2 days ago [-]
>and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet
That sounds absolutely horrifying. I never encountered one of those before thankfully.
akiselev 2 days ago [-]
Oh it gets better (not the OP but I think the following is even worse).
That DLL hooks into SCADA and sometimes sends updates to a PLC controlling safety critical equipment. When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows. The guy who wrote it died in an (unrelated) industrial accident involving a runaway forklift after leaving the company. Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
jasomill 2 days ago [-]
That's even worse than the time I was on a conference call with the COO of a Fortune 500 retailer who referred to "the Excel spreadsheet we use to keep track of the stores we own".
The subject matter was building an auditing system to comply with the requirements of an IRS consent decree as part of a settlement for shoddy accounting practices which may or may not have included tracking billions of dollars of assets with Excel.
RugnirViking 1 days ago [-]
what would be the proper way to keep track of assets? I'm not financially literate at all, just curious
jodrellblank 2 days ago [-]
> When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows.
Ask an LLM to reverse engineer it and explain it.
2 days ago [-]
jacobgkau 2 days ago [-]
They said this:
> Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
I'm guessing the fundamental reason debugging would require that isn't something an AI could get around. My guess is the LLM would immediately disregard whatever instructions you gave it not to cause having to replace all the crucibles, then say "Oops! You're right." when you point out that you asked it not to do that.
wholinator2 2 days ago [-]
Hmmm, but shouldn't there be some way to just make a copy of the file, put in a container and tell the AI, scan the environment, do nothing except watch what the excel sheet does and record it, then determine how to create an identical sandbox containing the same outputs and feedback. Then see if the sheet works in that sandbox. If it does, then debug it until you get identical behavior out of a new program. Then have a week/month of dry runs just copying the inputs from the real world to it and capturing its output to compare to the dll. Do that for long enough and you should have a drag and drop solution right?
I'm not saying it's easy, or worth anyone's time, but it should be possible right?
jacobgkau 7 hours ago [-]
Theoretically possible to do, absolutely. As easy as "ask an LLM to reverse engineer it and explain it," no.
Even if you use AI tools to assist, there's going to be a lot more manual work involved than simply throwing a prompt at a chatbot.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> Hmmm, but shouldn't there be some way to just make a copy of the file, put in a container and tell the AI, scan the environment, do nothing except watch what the excel sheet does and record it, then determine how to create an identical sandbox containing the same outputs and feedback.
AI will attempt to evade your sandbox.
The only thing you can do is ask the AI to do a decompile and have it summarize, or better, do the summary yourself.
imtringued 1 days ago [-]
He used the wrong word, he means a mock or testing harness or a digital twin of the factory.
jodrellblank 2 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing that's hyperbolic and not true.
It's possible the company who made the industrial machinery used an "Indiana Jones film booby trap" and a kernel level anti-cheat system from the AAA GameDev industry to detect debuggers being attatched and deliberately damage the expensive factory machinery you bought from them so that you would have to pay them to repair it. But would such a technically capable company produce a controller using an Excel spreadsheet and Visual Basic? Seems more likely that it would be a fairly pedestrian C dll written by electrical engineers with an RS-232 interface and logic for reading/writing stepper motor state and temperature sensors.
Anyway, I didn't suggest debugging it live. "Can Claude code just from DLLs?"[1] - "You could've just pasted the DLL into Claude by now and had the results. Claude can read and analyze basically anything" and "Claude has done that a lot for my projects. Doesn't matter if it's a dll built with .NET or C, etc. Claude just figures it out, somehow."
Even if you don't start with `strings` and a decompiler and whatever, it would take less time to copy the spreadsheet and DLL into Claude and prompt "what can you make of this? What are the major functions in the DLL, when does it do writing vs polling? What else does it do?" than it would take to write a breathless dramatic comment on HN about how Mission Impossible the task is.
But ok let's say it was built by villains and it is booby-trapped and the DLL is encrypted, password protected, hardware dongle verified, but somehow still on Windows XP or whatever, and it is impossible to even copy or take a backup - plug the cable into a logic analyzer on its way to the machinery and capture the wire protocol. It's likely using a standard old-school serial connection with a known protocol and no encryption or verification. It's not like they need to tap a 1.5Tbps undersea fibre bundle.
Thankfully we are finally after all these years getting regulation on that sort of stuff. It seems EU was 20 something years late... And no I really think that regulation in case like this is really reasonable idea.
fock 2 days ago [-]
sadly this is coming to your linux-distro in no time! Far too many single-dev core building block which are now adding features at breakneck speed conversing with AI only.
pessimizer 2 days ago [-]
> But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure
It's also astonishingly stupid. I don't want a one-off program for everything. I want a well-designed and battle-tested program that I can extend with AI, and that has a ton of people's AIs directed at it, constantly finding bugs, posting them on the bugtracker, and writing and debating pull requests.
I can't comprehend people who think that everything should be built over and over again, and that that will be safe, practical or cheap. It's like they're telling me that I should design a new language for each conversation that I have. Why would I?
The worst part is how far the capabilities of AI are from that dream anyway. They can't even write readable, intelligible code. They're being celebrated for being able to notice buffer overrun errors in code that people would also notice if anybody had ever really looked at some particular span of code in the last 10 years. It's finding errors in move fast and break things code and code that has been maintained by a weirdo professor in his spare time for free and half the economy somehow relies on. That's not magic, its a sign of how sloppy things got.
phil21 2 days ago [-]
Because IT/programmers/tech folks in general have abdicated their responsibilities for too long, imo. The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.
The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.
Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.
If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.
It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.
batat 1 days ago [-]
First, you do realize that when in some your-employer's-boring-CRM-system a certain field cannot be edited until a specific 5 conditions is met and that conditions allows an object to transition from "new" to "processing" status before field become available etc. then there was a reason for this.
Before Claude these people used to automate their processes in Excel. Then new people would come along and say, "None of this makes any sense to me so I'll just build my own even better automation in Excel". And again, and again. "Random sales people" won't ask Claude:
- Find out who was the PO in 2019, analyze why it was decided to introduce an additional status in FSTP-14475 instead of (...) What happens if the driver currently outside mobile coverage area and the task processing will return a 202 instead of a 200 (not described in the documentation; refer to FSTP-14385 for additional information), but the status will be updated before the deferred change returns (...)
Instead, they'll do something more like:
- I need to be able to quickly change this and that right here, get it done, don't make any mistakes.
Would be good if Claude could recognize an XY problem and respond "Understanding what you don't want is even more important than understanding what you do want" or "If you try to cut corners here again instead of following the established process - thereby making things more difficult for the people in the warehouse - I will inform your manager" instead of just charging ahead "you're absolutely right, see the goal, ignore the obstacles".
Second, it is easier to fix a flawed but already functional system than build a perfect one from scratch - without running into a problems, contradictions, previously unknown nuances during implementation. Because these contradictions, problems, and oddities over the last 10 years naturally gave you the requirements and specifications that no one of the sales-people and decision-making-people were able to articulate in a coherent way. And yes, now, having these specifications, you can rewrite it in Rust and do things better.
ghshephard 13 hours ago [-]
I've gone through at least 30+ iterations of CRMs / Bug/ Issue/ WorkTrackers/ AP/ Expense / Project tooling in 7 companies over 20 years.
One of the conclusions I've come to - is that 90%+ of the featureitis is checkbox nonsense, often created for managers and administrators who will never use the tools themselves, and are materially harmful to the employees who actually use them, while, ironically, providing zero to sometimes negative value to the Enterprise.
Some of the most profitable projects have been at 20+ year $30B+ companies where a new-generation of technologists have come in and just ... thrown it all away. All the transitions, gates, forms, custom fields, labels, business rules - all of the crud just dumped in the garbage and, amazingly- zero interruption to business, and the tools all of a sudden became moderately useful instead of offensive.
This is very much on topic with Postman, Kibana, Jira, etc.. Pretty much any large enterprise software suite that in order to justify it's millions/dollar a year of license fees, has to pack in feature that aren't valuable to the end-users, but can be used to ratchet up and lock in the enterprise users.
The problem with all of these companies is that once they take VC money, and have a Board driving them to make the chart go up and to the right - they have no option but to destroy what once was a beautiful product, and turn it into a morass of pain.
Tools like ffmpeg, sqlite, vlc, curl, wireshark continue to be excellent because they were never infected with VC money.
jasomill 2 days ago [-]
This sounds exactly like the promises of putting a PC on everyone's desktop rather than a terminal connected to a locked-down mainframe, which in the end led to the lockdown migrating to PCs and the few employees who had any interest in automation forced to use tools like Excel because it was at least an improvement over VBScript and batch files and IT wouldn't let them install legit development tools unless their job description required them.
What are the odds that the average corporate IT department is going to allow the use of anything other than locked-down corporate AI with strict token quotas and stricter acceptable use policies?
RetroTechie 1 days ago [-]
> Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason.
Sadly that doesn't help at all. Random people automating heaps of crap in order to do their actual work, just makes the crap easier to manage for them. It doesn't remove it.
I'm reminded of health workers or teachers complaining that half their time is wasted on various types of record-keeping, because employer wants to record, check & micromanage everything. Similar with tax systems becoming ever more complex. Those are just a few of many examples.
AI assisting with managing that, just puts some $profitable$ control knobs in the hands of a very few providers. While at the same time enabling the mountain of crap to grow even further.
A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.
Doesn't seem to me that that's being done. So far AI is mostly used to ADD to the crap-heap, faster & easier.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.
The thing is, that's been known for a long time, at the latest since the release of Bullshit Jobs [1].
Unfortunately, too many too rich interests are tied up in the status quo.
> The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.
And most organizations still treat IT as a "support role" which means "cost center", only changing attitude when they inevitably get hacked, and a few years down the line, when enough of the managers who were there during the Great Hack are gone, IT gets the cuts again.
jaapz 2 days ago [-]
> They can't even write readable, intelligible code.
That really is no longer an up to date view of LLM's. Frontier models can and do write readable, intelligible code.
They can also write shit code.
Kind of like human devs.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> Frontier models can and do write readable, intelligible code
The problem is that even frontier models still are prone to regurgitation. They are not that capable of organization and relevance, which is part of why so much LLM output is insanely grating to read.
READMEs in particular are the worst. LLMs tend to regurgitate stuff like "what is located where" that is of zero relevance to the reader, especially if it's yet another bog standard Java, Symfony or React app.
2muchcoffeeman 2 days ago [-]
Because even with AI I don’t have infinite capacity to make every piece of software well designed and I have other deadlines.
>They can't even write readable, intelligible code.
Skill issue.
CamperBob2 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
birdsongs 2 days ago [-]
True or not - this vibe of "deal with it, it's how things are" feels really crummy to me.
There's legitimate concerns and emotions here. No reason to be a dick when discussing it.
2 days ago [-]
ericfr11 2 days ago [-]
Poor judgement call
CamperBob2 2 days ago [-]
We'll see, won't we.
surgical_fire 2 days ago [-]
> Deal with it.
Whenever I spot this shitty cop out here, it is always on a bad take. Never fails.
bigstrat2003 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, I was going to vouch the comment because while I think it's a bad take, it doesn't really break the rules to have bad takes. Then I got to the arrogant "deal with it", and I think that does cross the line.
CamperBob2 2 days ago [-]
"Deal with it" crosses the line, but "bullshit" and "crap" doesn't. Got it.
1 days ago [-]
johnnyanmac 2 days ago [-]
One pretty much exclusively shuts down discussion. The others can be use to dismiss discussion, but not exclusively.
surgical_fire 2 days ago [-]
> Got it.
It's how things work. Deal with it.
CamperBob2 2 days ago [-]
Shooting the messenger does not, in fact, work.
vrganj 2 days ago [-]
Hoarders can get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
-- The Free Software Song, as written and sung by rms
While I agree with every word of this I never want to hear RMS sing this again.
cowlevel 2 days ago [-]
You won't be free though, you'll be living under a bridge if you don't get paid. The original free software movers had tenure.
tonymet 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
andyroid 2 days ago [-]
Indeed, a couple of GUI forms on top of curl is right up there with electricity, antibiotics and sliced bread.
tonymet 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
jmb99 1 days ago [-]
I did! As a high school project. Literally, in high school, one of our assignments was to build a GUI that could make basic HTTP requests (GET and POST, and I think PATCH or something for extra credit) and display the result “nicely.”
Obviously not as full-featured as Postman or Bruno. But this is not something complicated or difficult or novel. My high school teacher had been using this as an assignment since the mid-2000s.
tonymet 15 hours ago [-]
what's your MRR?
dspillett 2 days ago [-]
Because we don't have that special sort of brain that thinks turning such a simple useful tool into a commercial behemoth is a good idea? I doubt anyone there really things there is a useful purpose to it all, but they have to keep it in motion to keep their pay coming in.
tonymet 2 days ago [-]
the world is what you make of it. make something, sell it for exactly what you need to buy bread . I don't see why being so cynical is necessary.
Right now your boss has sold something, and pays you with the remainder. Is he a bad guy?
What's wrong if you did the same?
cj9 1 days ago [-]
> the world is what you make of it.
Except for every single aspect of it that you don't have control over...
tonymet 15 hours ago [-]
our ancestors were dying of disease, literally starving, fighting wild animals, fighting each other.
We're struggling to sell B2B Saas.
the world is what you make of it.
kaibee 1 days ago [-]
There is definitely a reasonable salary and team and infrastructure budget for 'Postman exists'. Its when that team takes 400M in capital and the labor hours of 1,500 people that could have been used for... well honestly literally anything else, that it becomes... well beyond parody really?
jodrellblank 2 days ago [-]
Silently installing hooks into your other tools, to route their traffic through Postman without your knowledge or consent, is not at all reasonable.
tonymet 2 days ago [-]
you skipped a node in the tree
Ambolia 2 days ago [-]
People hating you for the damage you cause while making money is also perfectly reasonable.
tonymet 2 days ago [-]
People here forgetting how forums work.
kentm 2 days ago [-]
How you try to make money off an invention may be perfectly reasonable, or it may be perfectly unreasonable. The "how" matters here.
tonymet 2 days ago [-]
nearly every "how" is going to trigger some haters.
preg_match 2 days ago [-]
Yes but they’re clearly not all equal. Not everyone is a “hater” for thinking that basically installing malware to make money is bad.
There are legitimate, ethical ways to make money, and then not so ethical ones. It seems for tech companies, they often can’t find the ethical ways or they simply don’t produce enough money, and so they feel forced to act unethically.
The only reason they get away with it is… well everyone is doing it. It’s a culture problem, and it’s viral to the entire tech economy. Nobody cares about being scummy, doing things behind users backs, invading their privacy, employing dark patterns, or even leaking highly sensitive data.
tonymet 2 days ago [-]
this is a bit of a bait and switch. The immediate comment was about opportunism in general.
MiroslavPokorny 2 days ago [-]
Postman is not an invention.
Its not that complicated, most engineers could write their own tool in a day or two.
latentsea 1 days ago [-]
Just like Dropbox.
Matl 1 days ago [-]
Expect there's about a thousand Postman alternatives on GitHub. And unlike Dropbox you don't need capital for infra so it's easy to make another one. So unlike Dropbox, Postman actually is relatively simple to copy.
tonymet 16 hours ago [-]
licensing the customer's own resources back to them for a fee is even more innovative. Higher margin, lower risk, less upfront capital.
You have to be terribly myopic not to appreciate it.
Honestly, the more money made off the "dumber" product, the more intelligent the businessman.
My favorite business is 1800GotJunk
tonymet 16 hours ago [-]
cope harder.
2 days ago [-]
theturtletalks 2 days ago [-]
It’s definitely the best version. I’m seeing so many amazing open source projects since people who once had the vision, but not the coding chops, can now build what they imagine. I myself am building a personal OS that connects to everything and it’s way more fun to build things and use them yourself vs just paying for some other software. Especially when that software can be enshittified or start to squeeze its users like you mentioned.
caned 2 days ago [-]
I'm also seeing people who previously had little interest in coding or understanding systems suddenly become empowered to pump out and deploy unmaintainable trash faster than their peers can resolve the problems they generate.
theturtletalks 2 days ago [-]
Suit yourself. Always diamonds in the rough and you can check repos I star on Github.
I built software to manage my own e-commerce business before AI coding existed but see teenagers I mentor vibe code applications that are actually helping them make money. They are 5-7 years ahead of where I was at their age and I started the e-commerce business in college.
And these people are making software for themselves and opensourcing it. So what are you on about peers resolving problems?
caned 2 days ago [-]
One effect doesn't exclude the other. I'm talking about people creating more problems than they are solving because they lack a fundamental understanding of how their systems, and the generated code that acts upon them, actually work. They're enamored with the ease and alacrity with which they can generate code but unwittingly leave a host of issues to be cleaned up. It's usually other people who discover the problems because these suddenly productive "authors" didn't have the know-how and awareness to create exacting enough prompts or sufficiently iterate on the generated output.
It's a phenomenon I've observed which doesn't necessarily take away from the benefits you've found. But maybe it's worth some consideration that this shift in empowerment isn't without negative consequences.
theturtletalks 2 days ago [-]
Have you built something you actually use? The feedback loop is immediate. You tell Claude and it goes it and fixes it.
You realize mostly proprietary software is made by people that haven’t even worked in that niche? Now people in that niche with these immediate loop can make software work way better and faster. Without the risk of it getting worse over time or selling out it a PE firm like Bending Spoons.
tempest_ 2 days ago [-]
So long as the token price stays low, because if it doesnt you will need the PE firm to pay for your tokens.
theturtletalks 2 days ago [-]
Not if you reach for something open-source and use that as the starting point. Most B2B customers are small businesses and once they build bespoke software that works with their business, they won’t need loads of tokens to keep it running.
surgical_fire 2 days ago [-]
Can you share any of these many open source projects? I am curious about them.
It’s by Vercel Labs, but it’s a small team and it’s basically a small website builder and even comes with 5 free prompts. I’m building on it to build a universal storefront
Someone who got early access to Fable 5.5 asked it to make an anime style video using html and it’s amazing. I might make a short film doing this one day.
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
B2B maybe? Usually these businesses thrive solely on flirting with the CTO and getting them to sign a lucrative contract and then mandate internal usage. I'm speaking from experience.
spoiler 2 days ago [-]
I worked at a company where postman was (incorrectly) set up, used by everyone in the company, including non-devs and the ops team to make API requests instead of letting us develop tooling... Everyone hated it, but the company kept paying for it.
Hell, our CI test suite ran Postman, but because that was badly set up if a test suite failed, it required manually editing some state, otherwise the Postman state got fucked and everything would fail.
Did we still continue paying for it, you might wonder? Yes, of course we did.
drdexebtjl 2 days ago [-]
Probably. They’ve been sending a lot of emails with creepy hyper-personalized AI-generated marketing material, trying to get us on an Enterprise contract. Things like slideshows that have the names and profile pictures of my colleagues who use Postman. Very weird.
aliasxneo 2 days ago [-]
This seems to be a trend now. I guess the dumbification is already started because I can't imagine a sane marketing person thinking this would generate positive leads. Unless they are targeting the same dumbified people.
Good4boothee 1 days ago [-]
> B2B maybe?
I hope their B2B income stream is amazing but last company I worked for banned them in entire organisation, after their push to store requests in the cloud. People split between older Postman versions - with auto-updater ripped out, using IntelliJ's build in http client, and few weirdos prefering SoapUI.
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
Still $5B is insane, that would make Postman worth more than JetBlue. Airlines aren't exactly a good business to be in, but Postman is fairly easily replicated.
cute_boi 2 days ago [-]
corruption at finest. There is no reason to use postman when hoppscotch or bruno is available.
radicalbyte 2 days ago [-]
Oh THAT'S what they're trying. Doesn't work on me %)
alfanick 2 days ago [-]
I cannot imagine 1500+ employees "working" on this. Wtf, it's a single person project.
For that amount of people, you should stock up on Baristi! I wouldn't want Espresso to be the bottleneck of an operation like this!
asimovDev 1 days ago [-]
They used to have a Kombucha sommelier but they were laid off in 2023
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
I can't even tell if you're joking or not.
dalmo3 2 days ago [-]
And no one to deliver the mail?
PcChip 2 days ago [-]
surely they have a postman for that
baobabKoodaa 2 days ago [-]
Still sounds much better than Oracle's employee composition!
SoleilAbsolu 2 days ago [-]
Well with a proverbial lawnmower at the top of the org chart, how many sets of weed-whackers, pruning shears, leafblowers, and RoundUp dispensers are below it?!
vincenthsin 1 days ago [-]
Probably it is true. This is the choice of capital.
MisterMunchkin 2 days ago [-]
Don’t forget the community manager, people lead and chaplain.
dominotw 2 days ago [-]
they are going to annouce layoffs laying of that 1 developer
MiroslavPokorny 2 days ago [-]
This is the modern capitalist model.
So many talkers making speeches and powerpoints and nothing else.
enbugger 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
strictnein 2 days ago [-]
It's pretty clear they were making a joke.
sp527 2 days ago [-]
It's both hilarious and telling that his jest was close enough to reality to provoke you into taking it so seriously.
embedding-shape 2 days ago [-]
I love how "1468 sales" was the outrageous part, not "1 developer, 10 managers, 20 C-suite" which came before it.
arvid-lind 2 days ago [-]
That just added up to 1500, so maybe the "+" is another manager. No need to be so hasty.
Philip-J-Fry 2 days ago [-]
To be fair Postman is a lot more than just a fancy curl client. It's a whole saas platform now.
bartread 2 days ago [-]
> It's a whole saas platform now.
I think the argument may be that it doesn't justify this - that the main benefit of the SaaS platform has been to provide 1500+ people with something to do - and that perhaps the SaaS platform doesn't really add enough value to justify its existence or the company's valuation.
I don't really have a point of view on this since I've only used the browser extension (though I don't have it installed at present, thankfully) so the SaaS part of the business might be amazingly useful or it might not: I'm just laying out what I infer the argument in this sub-thread to be.
talon8635 2 days ago [-]
Well, I guess if people need things to do, and others are willing to pay, then what’s the problem?
jeremyjh 2 days ago [-]
TFA is the problem. There is no actual value proportional to their expenses, so the only path is enshittification and grifting.
boomlinde 2 days ago [-]
To be fair, is there a good reason that it should be?
bdangubic 2 days ago [-]
was there a good reason for a search engine to provide email service? :)
dspillett 2 days ago [-]
If they can charge for it, why not? Search is an important part of mail for many users, so there is some cross-over in knowledge/experience that can be leveraged.
And assuming you mean Google, the question is based on a false premise. They were an advertising company years before gmail was introduced, and an ad-tech company being able to trawl your mail to find ways to advertise at you is a very different proposition to a search company releasing the same product.
bdangubic 2 days ago [-]
> being able to trawl your mail to find ways to advertise at you…
much like POSTMAN can trawl through all my API calls to see what other business they make from all this data they are mining now, yes?
sumedh 1 days ago [-]
To provide personalized ads?
Keyframe 2 days ago [-]
can it send email yet?
ako 2 days ago [-]
If you use an api?
ex-aws-dude 2 days ago [-]
As someone who hasn't used it since like 8 years ago that reads like satire
kklisura 2 days ago [-]
Wait till you hear Docusign has 7k employees...
colejohnson66 23 hours ago [-]
I've heard this and always wondered if most are related to compliance?
ayush--s 2 days ago [-]
I logged in to postman today after 3 years to use some public API, and god, it was so damn unusable. It took me navigating through "workspace", "environments", etc etc before I could hit the simplest of http endpoints.
tisdadd 2 days ago [-]
I switched to Bruno when payment started requiring login, love having the ability to just check it into git.
01CPMD3174 2 days ago [-]
Ah thanks for name dropping Bruno. I actually never found the Postman alternative I was looking for. Using wget is fine. It would be nice to have an interface with collections again. Will check out Bruno this weekend…
ehnto 1 days ago [-]
I also use Bruno and it's great. One amazing benefit it saves in human readable formats.
You can give an AI agent a documentation page and it will create the collection of routes pretty quickly in files you can commit to git.
martin_a 1 days ago [-]
For me this is one of the biggest features/nice-to-haves! Just a folder with text files to define your environment that you can easily sync to other devices, backup, move to the next client...
I can't remember why I settled on this over Bruno, but its much better than dealing with Postman.
nkjoep 1 days ago [-]
I had switched to Bruno as well. Unfortunately enshittyfication caught up also there.
01CPMD3174 2 days ago [-]
Exactly. Back in 2015 when I was still coding professionally Postman was our go-to tool for API testing.
Earlier this year I reached for Postman when kicking off a side project. I was appalled by how convoluted it has become. It really is a Frankenstein product. And they can’t seem to figure out what their offer really is.
No thanks. RIP to the OG Postman. The new Postman is dead to me.
vanschelven 2 days ago [-]
Someone should vibe-code a VC death clock for developer tools. Enter a company, and it will deduce from its last funding round and headcount the moment it all goes to shit.
In an utlimate twist of irony such a tool could itself pivot to investors because the moment it gets really bad is also the moment to invest in the competition.
I'm not saying that's my strategy with Bugsink, but I'm not saying it isn't either.
I must say, this style of UI has become really grating even for toy projects.
nekooooo 2 days ago [-]
the claudish here is almost unintelligible as well
2 days ago [-]
jasomill 2 days ago [-]
I'm not sure why I'd trust a site that gives OpenAI and example.com equal marks as "already dead" because they're "vulnerable [...] to AI-native replacement" for anything but a laugh.
RugnirViking 1 days ago [-]
it lists spotify at risk because it's just a music player and easy to replicate...
vanschelven 2 days ago [-]
"Our models are busy right now. Please retry in a moment."
Hacker News (comment) hug of death? Or victim of its own punchline?
autoexec 2 days ago [-]
> Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.
DrewADesign 2 days ago [-]
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+
Because, current valuations are completely detached from any operational or market realities that affect a company. The metric has become the goal, and the metric is controlled by nontechnical people that have no intuitive understanding of how technical products are used. Even worse, they’ve all gone though a vibe coding tutorial and now either believe they have real technical depth, or believe that it doesn’t matter.
cowlevel 2 days ago [-]
Technical is subordinate to business and always has been (apart from a bunch of last century hackers with university tenure). If business no longer thinks it can make money with human developers, they'll be laid off. It doesn't matter whether the product is better or worse.
DrewADesign 2 days ago [-]
That’s business administration, which has nothing to do with the valuation process, anymore. A company could be run by some trust fund kid with no understanding of business that hired a full-time department of 10 people to repaint the lines in the parking lot every day, but if their story was impressive enough, their valuation could be astronomical. It’s all about vibes (in SV, at least.)
mikestew 2 days ago [-]
I used to use Postman daily almost ten years ago. Then as my last hurrah before retirement, I took an embedded job that didn't involve me beating on a web API, so I didn't use Postman anymore.
So imagine that I hear about this "Postman" product that involves subscriptions, and AI, and "valued at $X billion" and all this crap, and you can see how I seriously thought that there was another product called "Postman" that wasn't the product I used to use. Turns out...
pavlov 2 days ago [-]
I haven’t met anyone using MongoDB in what feels like 12 years, but it’s a $26B company.
There’s apparently a surprisingly profitable enterprise afterlife to developer tools that manage to become popular in the right moment, even if the moment is fairly short.
pants2 2 days ago [-]
Databases are extremely sticky because migrating can be a nightmare. Postman seems like it would be much less sticky, you can just import your Postman collection to Bruno and it's pretty much a drop-in replacement.
thepra 2 days ago [-]
I feel called, mongodb user here ( • ▽ • ; )
cowlevel 2 days ago [-]
Evaluate Postgres. It's a great jack-of-all-trades, as is the relational model in general.
I was about to ask why on earth an HTTP client needs 1500 employees and a 5B valuation, but then I realized that perhaps it is just envy speaking.
Im simply envious that I dont own an AI-native cloud-first enterprise-grade zero-trust secure-by-design API lifecycle management ecosystem powered by agentic AI workflows autonomous coding agents pre built skills context graphs semantic knowledge retrieval augmented generation multi agent collaboration next generation developer productivity acceleration platform with a revolutionary cURL GUI client valued at 5 billion dollars with 1500 employees
ozim 2 days ago [-]
You don’t know any developer yes.
I do know business analysts, testers, non-technical people asking me for postman collections.
Postman became de-facto standard for businesses. Even though devs have ditched it.
wrntluserstupid 1 days ago [-]
How did we even get here? Apparently I can't convince anyone to use Jellyfin off of their main computer to their main smart tv, because "it's too hard" (too hard to double click and icon and select a folder?)
But we can somehow magically convince non-technicals to share cloud collections of endpoint requests to backend services.
ozim 1 days ago [-]
They are getting paid for dealing with API’s. If they would rely on devs only they would be out.
Then postman made it easier for them to deal with something they have to do anyway.
pjmlp 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, they managed to land on the IT blacklist for several of our customers.
Nowadays Portman is forbidden for project delivery, unless the customer development team also uses it.
jfyi 2 days ago [-]
A surprising number of developers I work with don't actually know how to use curl. Postman is ubiquitous among that crowd.
colejohnson66 2 days ago [-]
That's just GUIs being easier to use than CLIs for most people. After all, that's why Postman got popular - it's a GUI to do curl without the CLI! Or Handbrake to avoid using ffmpeg. Or various "paint" applications to rotate images instead of using imagemagik.
The problem is that Postman decided to want to be a business and took VC money.
Ekaros 2 days ago [-]
I know lot of bits with curl. But I find it always a pain to use. Fine for when you do scripting but I find command line pretty painful overall. So I understand want to use some other tool with better ergonomics.
bloaf 2 days ago [-]
I wrote a lot of python. Whenever I was working with an API, I'd just spin up a jupyter notebook and write out the calls I wanted to try out in a python notebook, once I had everything working, it was just a copy paste job into the codebase.
Using some kind of dedicated tool like postman always felt like a literal step backwards.
threetonesun 2 days ago [-]
10 years ago I totally get that but these days there's plugins built into every IDE that can smooth over the annoyances of testing an API via curl without having to invoke paying for Postman and dealing with all of its nonsense.
Of course now that I said that today I'd probably just have Claude hit the API for me, or build a dashboard to test it, I really don't know how Postman continues to exist.
orochimaaru 2 days ago [-]
I’ve never understood the allure of postman. Curl has been my thing for a while. I don’t see that changing.
jasomill 2 days ago [-]
If history has taught us anything, it's that there's at least a limited-time market for inferior GUI alternatives to nearly anything you can easily do from a command-line. Though to be fair, there's plenty of room for value-add over curl for web requests in terms of presentation where GUIs can work well: asset viewers, syntax highlighting, pretty printing, code folding, etc., especially if combined with interactive tools for decoding and deobfuscation that feed back into the viewer.
The obvious AI integration is reverse engineering tools, assuming the trend towards locking such things down doesn't continue.
And honestly, I worry less about people paying $29 for a GUI file renaming tool than I do about the same people copy/pasting LLM-generated shell snippets, given that LLMs will inevitably have trained on the existing corpus of shell scripts, many if not most of which contain potentially dangerous bugs, especially when used outside their intended context of known-trustworthy input.
sumedh 1 days ago [-]
Not everyone wants to deal with command line.
This feels like dropbox comment.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+
Like statistics, 90% of valuations are totally made-up.
skrebbel 2 days ago [-]
> Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
Wtf!! how
richin13 2 days ago [-]
For some reason, it is very popular in my country (Costa Rica). Every freelancer I’ve worked with only knows about postman
It’s like it was very popular back in the day and people never got the memo there’s better options out there
coldtea 2 days ago [-]
>It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
The good thing is that now takes about 2 days to replicate with an agent the parts that matter from their whole offering and tell them to go f themselves.
oliyoung 2 days ago [-]
> I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
Its endemic in enterprise engineering/QA, for all the reasons we mourn its loss its big, and big is trusted in these circles
andy81 2 days ago [-]
That's momentum, not utility.
Any non-programmer can now copy-paste http requests from Dev Tools or a free-tier LLM for a better service than Postman.
New companies have no good reason to use Postman. Old ones can slowly migrate away.
pintxo 1 days ago [-]
It can be very slow, people are migrating away from IBM for 40+ years now...
bonestamp2 2 days ago [-]
> I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
I have no need for it, but there's one company I work with and all of their developers still use it. What do you do/recommend instead?
Insomnia has enshittified over the past few years too, its original author started https://yaak.app/ and it's pretty alright for most of my Postman-relevant use. Not as heavy on automation or API-documentation, but for testing endpoints it's been great.
irreverentmike 2 days ago [-]
Hey thanks for sharing the APIs You Won't Hate Link! I'm one of the cofounders of the community. I've had a good time with Bruno, personally. Being git-enabled is a big plus.
If you've got other suggestions, I'd love to give them a look!
I used to use it but then we added Swagger UI to our APIs so now there's no need.
anonreplier 2 days ago [-]
There are loads of alternatives now, I use yaak, but you could just ask an agent to create one for you in 20 minutes
losvedir 2 days ago [-]
Claude.
efilife 2 days ago [-]
I use Yaak
baud147258 2 days ago [-]
We're using Postman at work (I think we have a subscription for 10 or 20 users), mostly when doing REST development and to share the API calls between people. Though I rarely have to use it so each time I'm so confused of between the collections, environment, vaults, variables...
Also if you have an alternative that's easier to use, I'm interested
quchen 2 days ago [-]
We switched to Bruno 2 years ago. Haven't used it much lately but it was a really good replacement at the time.
justincormack 2 days ago [-]
They were valued at $5.6bn in 2021, in the ZIRP boom, and havent raised since. Unlikely they can raise at anything like that now.
agrippanux 2 days ago [-]
Doesn't help that the core product is one of the easiest vibe-code prompts ever.
enbugger 2 days ago [-]
It seems like cursed(blessed) niche? In search of alternatives couple of years ago, I'm stumbled upon Mockoon which looked really like a single person project. Now, judging by their webpage, I see they are going the same way
liendolucas 2 days ago [-]
Postman valued at 5 billon? WTF? I mean the IT industry lives in a fart cloud honestly. I really really think everything is just a little bit overvalued, isn't it?
People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.
rdtsc 2 days ago [-]
I know right? I would think even $5M would be excessive. It’s interesting that with AI now anyone can throw something together like that within a few days. Investors are probably squeezing them pretty hard to get their returns back before anyone and their uncle can create their own postman.
mschuster91 2 days ago [-]
> People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.
They should but Bash escaping/encoding is nasty and most terminals have a hard time using the mouse to reliably edit a cURL command, especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output. And it gets oh so tiring when the "copy cURL" command includes about 1000 bytes worth of Cookie headers full of analytics garbage.
That's why Postman became a thing in the first place.
dspillett 2 days ago [-]
> and most terminals have a hard time using the mouse to reliably edit a cURL command
This is true. Even though I'm not much of a mouse user for it, I tend to edit curl commands of much length in a text editor when I'm doing things by hand, then pasting into the terminal.
> especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output
Or if your prompt outputs something to stderr instead of stdout so it doesn't get counted when the shell is trying to position where you are in editing the stream. Ubuntu's default prompt under byobu is a pain for this when I move to a different machine and forget to carry my tweaks for that.
For the missing final \n I just hit [enter] an extra time, but getting round the stderr thing isn't quite that simple.
liendolucas 2 days ago [-]
Yes, that's true. You can suffer a lot escaping things out, but is also a valuable lesson! Not promoting those extreme cases, but many many times a few simple curl calls can save your day.
surgical_fire 2 days ago [-]
Personally, I replaced Postman years ago with IntelliJ's HTTP client. It is pretty good.
vlyan 2 days ago [-]
ditto.
the only time I'd tried postman I got SaaS vibes from it, and I'd seen enough SaaS slop by then.
SoftTalker 2 days ago [-]
curl and jq is all I've ever needed for working with http APIs and JSON responses.
krmmalik 2 days ago [-]
>>>I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore.
Just out of curiosity, what are developers using these days?
My IDE has always been for a lot more than coding, so even though most of the coding is now done in a terminal by an AI agent, I still spend many hours everyday in my IDE.
dspillett 2 days ago [-]
There are a couple of open source alternatives (though at least some of those have tried to go the way of Postman to some extent), just using curl directly, or we've rolled our own wrappers (personally, or team- or company-wide) for our specific use cases.
Bruno has now replaced Insomnia, because Insomnia also forces you to create a cloud account with them...
jrks11o 2 days ago [-]
They chased B2B revenue too hard, my work built internal alt in a few days that fits more appropriately with our orgs usecases earlier this year, Sad lol
davesque 2 days ago [-]
I always felt like Postman was just a waste of time next to simple bash helper scripts wrapping curl commands.
2 days ago [-]
pmkary 1 days ago [-]
Why the fuck do they need 1,5000 employees???
MOARDONGZPLZ 2 days ago [-]
Sales called me a couple weeks ago. I told them Postman had a bad reputation among developers and I wouldn’t be using it. The salesperson was just absolutely incredulous that anyone could feel this way. It was pretty funny. Maybe they’re drinking their own Kool Aid.
100111011111 2 days ago [-]
You're stating this on your combinator forums of all places. Do you know who owns and runs that company and their economic principles?
agilek 2 days ago [-]
1500+ ppl? :-O
asdff 2 days ago [-]
I feel the same way about docker. This things just running containers and yet its a billion dollar company.
imtringued 1 days ago [-]
multi-OS desktop application with
cross-platform container virtualization
integrated single-node kubernetes orchestration
plus various services such as
global container image hosting
automated supply chain security
distributed cloud build system
production container runtime
collaborative development sandboxes
vs
a curl competitor
Yes, they're in the same league.
asdff 15 hours ago [-]
All that stuff you said above would have been in a fos tool if docker were made 15 years ago. So many tools have just as wide a scope and don't ask for a dime and give their stuff up under mit license. And I’m sure none of those maintainers of essential foss are hurting for work or opportunities with a resume that says you maintain a tool that a good fraction of the computers in the world use.
hkt 1 days ago [-]
I don't want to be a snob, but my recollection of postman is as a smell: it indicated somebody had such discomfort with the CLI that their abilities were ceilinged by it.
It is crazy what people manage to raise funds for.
2 days ago [-]
darepublic 2 days ago [-]
Yes a prime example of enshittification. You attract attention making something humble in scope but good.. but then it is compelled to become something much more. Same story with Coursera imo
When was the last time you heard about a VC-backed company going out of business? They either go unicorn or they get frozen until another VC-funded company is large enough to absorb them and quietly absorb their lack of value. Postman is a big morsel but I guarantee some company is being lined up just perfectly to consume them.
theturtletalks 2 days ago [-]
Everything will be enshittified, it’s not a question of if but when. The incentives are simple, the stock ticker must go up.
_doctor_love 2 days ago [-]
> a tiny OSS/passion project like curl
Um.
saghm 2 days ago [-]
I was looking to see if someone had posted a reaction to this part, because if no one had, I was going to! I don't disagree with the parent comment at all, but if curl is an example of a tiny project, I'm not sure what could possibly be considered large. It's literally the first example I'd give if asked for an example of an open source utility getting deployed on like, everything in the world.
_doctor_love 2 days ago [-]
>* It's literally the first example I'd give if asked for an example of an open source utility getting deployed on like, everything in the world.*
SQLite would be another strong contender.
pants2 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
embedding-shape 2 days ago [-]
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
I think most people here on HN is within or close by the "Innovators" part of the "Technology adoption life cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle). When Postman hit mainstream, it was already bloated and ruined, and "Innovators" had already moved on to something else, but for Postman that's just the beginning, as they're in the "Early Majority" part, and still have a tail to ride, so investors and everyone else can extract all the value from the remaining s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ users.
sneak 2 days ago [-]
This is why the right to fork exists in open source licenses. It’s easier than ever now, too, thanks to LLMs. You might even be able to oneshot forking and removing the malware and rebranding and rebuilding f/oss crapware these days.
I’ve been considering setting up a nonprofit solely to do this and to republish things like Mattermost, Stats, Bitwarden, etc with the corporate antifeatures ripped out.
FuriouslyAdrift 2 days ago [-]
Bruno. Open source base, runs locally, data remains on your infrastructure.
Yeah I am aware fo the open source base with subscripton model they have. I hope it doesn't go the direction of N8N because that's a fuster cluck.
pixl97 2 days ago [-]
Yep, this is what I moved to.
trueno 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
pxc 2 days ago [-]
Postman has always been proprietary software, hasn't it?
sneak 2 days ago [-]
Oh, my mistake! I always assumed it was f/oss that slowly boiled the frog. Turns out it wouldn’t have been in the running for consideration in my daily use stack anyway.
_s_a_m_ 1 days ago [-]
The natural progression of projects in the U.S. Capitalism eats up your country.
mschuster91 2 days ago [-]
> Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
... what the fuck. Certainly explains things
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
Yep, one of them. I loved Postman but gone back to plain cURL and the dogshit that is IntelliJ's built-in HTTP request tool.
As for the question... easy. Markets can stay irrational for a very long time...
fapjacks 1 days ago [-]
From their website: "We're a global company headquartered in San Francisco—with offices in Bangalore (where the company was founded) and Japan—and distributed team members on multiple continents."
... for.... .... postman?
jameson 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
postmannotlover 2 days ago [-]
EDIT: sorry, I was cranky. I just really don't like Postman/its UI/BS. To each his/her own.
bfbf 2 days ago [-]
Weird take. Just because you can use curl it doesn’t mean you can’t value a GUI to be able to store and manipulate requests quickly and view a formatted response body.
I use postman all the time to explore apis. Sure I could do it from the command line, but this is quicker and it saves my request payloads.
(Though now I’m obviously open to suggestions for better tools)
tempestrose 2 days ago [-]
Get an older copy of fiddler.
syhol 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
thisIsFiner 2 days ago [-]
Weird take. I thought for myself about the problem and solved it rather than externalize such and end up locked into an increasingly abusive relationship.
Been using homegrown scripts designed around wget and curl, accessible as shell aliases so I save time never downloading Postman or developing muscle memory for it, yet can still explore APIs
There's an idea for a better tool; the one you patch right in to your workflow to avoid context switches to a GUI mental model; I just focus on computer generating data rather than color of the virtual captains chair
bfbf 2 days ago [-]
Not sure if you’re trolling but writing “homegrown scripts as shell aliases” is not faster than a gui. I totally agree Postman is enshittified, but when I just want to see a sample response for given input data, it does the job. Sure I’d like a more lightweight tool, but there’s no way I’m “context switching” to writing shell scripts when I just want to check a single endpoint. (I’d also wager than in many cases, opening a gui and hitting send on a pre-saved request is faster than using an llm too)
You can do what you like though, my original comment was against the gatekeeping and punching down. I don’t care one way or another what tool you use, but let’s not make people inferior because they aren’t using a TUI for everything.
thisIsFiner 2 days ago [-]
Borrowed your own rhetorical style as the fastest means to relate to you, text on a screen.
OP is all "here's my way" and you're all "weird take" where weird felt wielded like a pejorative relative to OP not using GUI for everything.
Didn't realize it was possible to attack someone with their own rhetorical style. Figured they'd be used to themselves by now.
Shorel 2 days ago [-]
You can try www.APIKulture.com
It is basically that, also similar to Bruno but using 20 times less RAM.
primitivesuave 2 days ago [-]
Postman logs detailed information on every single API request you make through its tool, including query parameters. If you use the templating syntax `{{some_secret}}` to fill in a query parameter, it sends the actual secret content of `some_secret` to Postman's servers. If you disable outgoing network traffic to this logging endpoint, the entire app will stop working properly.
I discovered this when investigating whether Postman is HIPAA-compliant (it is not).
wackget 2 days ago [-]
That sounds all sorts of illegal, and all sorts of immoral.
My main point was that I wouldn't want my secrets to ever be sent to Postman under any circumstance (or alternately, stop calling them "secret"). A lot of the online responses were some variation of "why are you sending secrets in query parameters in the first place?" (I'm not). When I posted on Reddit, it escalated to targeted harassment by people who were obviously current/former employees at Postman.
I did send out an email blast to a bunch of CIOs/CSOs in my network which went a bit "email viral" through forwarding, and this ended up triggering a substantial amount of enterprise cancellations.
lelandfe 2 days ago [-]
> some variation of "why are you sending secrets in query parameters in the first place?" (I'm not)
The example from the blogpost: `http://localhost:4000/patient/{(SECRET}}`
Wherein the logger logs the final URL with the secret.
I think I agree with the masses? It strikes me as an odd place to put a secret.
> Postman is, in essence, "looking over your shoulder" and jotting down all URLs you query
gokulravi992 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
MiroslavPokorny 2 days ago [-]
I am still dumbfounded what value Postman can make in capturing all the publics usage. Sure they could mine the data, but they cant exactly use it in any legal way so why bother ?
SamuelAdams 23 hours ago [-]
You may want to check recent changes, as of May 2026 it is HIPAA compliant.
Who still uses Postman? In my experience it became insanely slow and bloated. Switched to Bruno. IMO, Postman is like uTorrent, everybody heard about it and many install because of inertia.
karthikeyankc 2 days ago [-]
Mostly enterprise teams and intermediate devs from my experience. I lead the API platform for a popular e-signature company, and a postman collection is the first thing devs ask for. Even when we point them to our docs, they'd rather just import a collection and start hitting endpoints immediately.
Haven't heard of Bruno until now. Looks like a solid offline-first tool. I don't see a public collection or web runner, and it looks like it supports GitHub-based sharing. Postman on the other hand, their public API network (or whatever they call it) along with the web runner reduce a lot of friction for API vendors like us and for dev teams who just want to quickly play with the API in the browser, especially during their evaluation stage.
zamalek 2 days ago [-]
You commit your collection to git if you want to share it.
DuncanCoffee 2 days ago [-]
Switched from Bruno to Voiden, it's more of a postman + notebook. Bruno started adding premium and stuff and I didn't want to wait to migrate again...
tommica 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, updated Bruno after a while, saw the premium stuff and immediately thought of Postman
karel-3d 1 days ago [-]
Bruno Premium is some enterprise nonsense. You don't need to use it.
Since it's all in plain text it's easy to share in a repo.
jvzv 2 days ago [-]
bruno is really great used it for a while but the 5 API syncs a month on the free tier is a pain, had to switch to Apidog never been so happy with unlimited syncs
_fat_santa 2 days ago [-]
I use hopscotch and highly recommend it. Very similar UI to postman and it just works.
andy81 2 days ago [-]
Bruno is no better in the way that matters - curl/requests/httpclient etc. are now easier to write and understand than any external templating tool.
shimman 2 days ago [-]
Use to work at one org in a bloated financial company that was paying Postman nearly $40,000 a month for a license provided to every person in the org. Regardless if they were a dev or not. I suspect the sales pitch pushes for unnecessary licenses because out of around 500 employees in the org, only 80 were developers and out of those 80 only one single team used postman. So this one org was overpaying by nearly >95%, doubt this org is truly unique regarding this.
I suspect that nearly every single public corporation are likely overpaying for software products, it's a waste of capital and extremely inefficient. All it shows is that corporations are too loose with their money and can probably deserve to get their tax obligations increased by a good 20-40% if they're this okay with wasting it.
ex-aws-dude 2 days ago [-]
I'm not really a vibe-coder but it seems like the easiest possible tool to vibe-code
Or just give your agent JSON and tell it to use curl
snapetom 2 days ago [-]
It's one of those things that have become "enterprise." There's always been better competitors out there, but it was so big, it's the easy choice for companies that are too lazy to do proper/fast vetting.
bottombutton 2 days ago [-]
Working in healthcare, and Postman got decertified by our Cyber team for this. We all switched to Bruno overnight. Their sales team is pinging us like gangbusters though.
happytoexplain 2 days ago [-]
A lot of GxP environments had already ditched Postman because it auto-syncs your API schemas to their cloud, as well as values and secrets.
tonfreed 2 days ago [-]
Bruno is fantastic. Switched a while ago and haven't even thought about going back
rvz 2 days ago [-]
Bruno is VC backed [0] and will (eventually) do the exact same thing for the sake of growth.
This is even after they said they would never raise money, but again the users were not going to pay for Bruno nor donate even.
Wrote a blog post [0] earlier this year about Bruno. Very funny they are really working there way down the todo list the creator claimed was a we’ll-never-do list.
[0] https://royathan.com/blog/the-api-client-hunt/
happytoexplain 2 days ago [-]
Aw, fuck.
nicce 2 days ago [-]
I will just keep using curl
troyvit 23 hours ago [-]
If you want to complicate your life just a little bit, there's hurl: https://hurl.dev/
The downside for me is that I have a filesystem littered with .hurl files and no real organization. But it's one step more organized than just curl.
waterTanuki 2 days ago [-]
FWIW Bruno can be forked unlike Postman. Not to mention, it would be trivial to vibe code something like this now. Postman absolutely deserves its downfall for trying to nickel and dime customers.
dham 2 days ago [-]
We went to bruno years ago and has been good. Nice to be able to store the request definitions in git. But to be honest, don't really need any of these tools anymore.
reddalo 2 days ago [-]
+1 for Bruno, it's simple and great.
They offer a paid version though, so I'm always afraid it's going to enshittify in the future, just like Postman and then Insomnia did.
CommonGuy 2 days ago [-]
I have been building Kreya [1] for over 6 years now as a Postman alternative. It's offline-first and privacy focused with a storage format made for git.
In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...
(kreya:99500): Gtk-WARNING *: 09:39:54.893: Unknown key gtk-modules in /home/daniel/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini
CommonGuy 1 days ago [-]
Sorry to hear that! That warning is unlikely the cause of the crash, it just means that some GKT3 settings are no longer supported in GTK4 and should be removed from the settings.ini, but they do not crash the app.
Please note that our AppImage does not include the required libgkt-4-1 and libwebkitgtk-6.0-4 dependencies. I just noticed that this is not documented, my bad! Installing them will probably fix your issue.
If not or if you have any other questions, you can write me at hello@kreya.app
FridgeSeal 2 days ago [-]
Mad respect.
Kreya is my go-to for playing GRPC endpoints. Basically every other tool has some whacky behaviour, got rapidly abandoned, or had janky ux.
georgel 2 days ago [-]
Postman went from a great lightweight tool to a bloated up-selling mess.
wolttam 2 days ago [-]
As do all great things once VC sinks its teeth in.
999900000999 2 days ago [-]
I know I’d also take 400 million in VC funding in hopes of eventually becoming a billionaire.
Vs making tools for donations and no one appreciating it!
bluefirebrand 2 days ago [-]
I'm really curious what difference to your lifestyle being a billionaire would be compared to 400 million
Maybe I'm just too small minded to imagine, but having that kind of money just seems so unnecessary to me
jmb99 1 days ago [-]
Raising $400M != having $400M personally.
Although, at that level of raise, I assume the ceo/founder(s) would probably be taking a least a few million, maybe $10M over the course of the raises + elapsed time?
There’s definitely a substantial difference between a net worth of $10M and a net worth of $100M. After that, I imagine most people wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference day to day.
ion_trapper 2 days ago [-]
Is someone who has $100k reasonable for wanting $1M? Sure, one would struggle to buy a nice house with only $100k. With $1M it is much easier.
Do you think someone who has only $100, whose only thought is how to pay for their next meal or rent check, might similarly wonder “what difference is there between $100k and $1M? They’re both very rich!”
Point is, ambition is like a gas, it tends to expand to the volume of its container. With $400M you have enough for your own and your family’s comfort forever. With $4B it’s less about lifestyle and more about shaping the world to your liking. You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting.
bluefirebrand 2 days ago [-]
> You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting
Nah, it sounds sociopathic no matter what amount of money you have
ion_trapper 1 days ago [-]
Next time don’t claim you are “really curious” for a perspective when your actual intent is to espouse moral superioirty.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
There might have been an actual good reason to seek that much wealth beyond what an individual needs that I hadn't considered before
Controlling other people by "shaping the world to your desires" isn't what I was hoping to hear
program_whiz 1 days ago [-]
What if you want $4B so you can finally end homelessness, or really contribute meaningfully to cancer research, or ending mortality? These are "shaping the world" that aren't possible for someone with a measly $10M, but might take billions to achieve, as well as aligning political actors (who require donations). "Shaping the world" doesn't have to be a bad thing, that's what we otherwise call "civic duty" when we try to shape the world with our votes.
999900000999 2 days ago [-]
You can’t just take the VC money and run away.
shimman 2 days ago [-]
Why not? It's not like VCs are gambling with their own money after all, they're okay to waste the money of pensioners but rarely, if ever, their own.
00deadbeef 1 days ago [-]
It's Electron, it was never lightweight
ivanjermakov 2 days ago [-]
I remember it being annoying to use even in 2019.
dvtkrlbs 2 days ago [-]
I've been using Yaak [1] for a while. It is a breath of fresh air.
One nice thing about it is only the builds are licensed. If you build from source it is MIT.
chanux 1 days ago [-]
Great job putting the list together.
I think https://httpie.io is also in the category (I have only used it in CLI form, long back. My use cases don't need anything more than curl)
gregrobson 2 days ago [-]
+1 for Yaak, I've used it for over a year for work and personal projects. It is stable and fast (also the dev behind it has the first name as me, so I'm a bit biased towards other Gregs!).
ediamondscience 2 days ago [-]
I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today. The best version of it was just a logger and a formatter on top of an http client. The proto import was nice for gRPC. Who thought that relatively simple tool needed accounts and MCPs and whatever else they've thrown into it?
Havoc 2 days ago [-]
> I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today.
You can’t have a unicorn valuation built on a simple offline client.
This is basically standard SV play book - first step is „fix“ it to have a cloud component/account. Then store some of the data in cloud only - say for example for team sharing or a „workspace“. Then make some features paid only. Then ramp up the enshitification till metrics show it’s saturated and users will bear no more
unkn0wn_root 2 days ago [-]
If anyone is interested in a Postman alternative but likes TUIs and leans more toward using .http files, check out resterm[0].
Lots of discussion about less terrible alternatives to postman. For those already using a Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well. I haven't used it for anything too complicated, but for routine stuff where you need to hit an endpoint and fiddle with the payload and headers it's great.
isityettime 2 days ago [-]
> [for every] Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well
The JetBrains IDE, Visual Studio, and VS Code all support http files as well, which can be checked into an application.
kubelsmieci 2 days ago [-]
The REST Client for VS Code is pretty good; I’ve been using it for a few years now.
dboreham 1 days ago [-]
I've been doing this stuff since before http existed and have never used postman or anything similar. Just write code. Now LLMs write the code.
firefoxd 2 days ago [-]
Postman was my curl with a gui. Used it everywhere, recommended it everywhere. But one day out of the blue it asks me to login, and it all went downhill from there. Imagine you had to login to use curl?
Anyway, I'm sure somewhere in some terms and conditions I agreed to, it says "we own the glass".
npteljes 7 hours ago [-]
My project freezes the postman version to the last one which supports local data, 10.27.x or something. I honestly can't fathom what extra feature can a newer version have that is critically missing from this old one. It feels like a solved problem to me. I know that tools change all the time, but this version seems to do whatever a postman like tool can do, and more.
To be honest, the beancounter mindset could have been felt from this project for many years now, starting with their hosted online integration.
paweladamczuk 1 days ago [-]
I needed something like Bruno or Postman the other day and instead I had an LLM agent generate two throwaway bash/python scripts based on the API client code I already had.
That's just one use case but I feel like such tools lost a lot of the relevance because of LLMs.
myzek 1 days ago [-]
You just described one minor use case of the tools and claim it's not needed anymore
It's like saying cars are obsolete now because you only used yours to go to the church and use your bike for that now
Don't know about Postman, but Bruno has much more to offer. In our team we use an exported shared collection (stored in github) of all the extensive APIs of all the apps we share or even those we just use so that anyone can just import that and use them
paweladamczuk 22 hours ago [-]
I do not claim it's not needed anymore
Waterluvian 2 days ago [-]
I replaced that garbage with Insomnia years back. I’m just waiting until I hear that Insomnia is also a problem and where to go next.
mzajc 2 days ago [-]
Insomnia 8.0 and above requires an account on their servers to use. The stated reason was that this makes it easier to advertise to you. No thanks.
Bruno is a serviceable replacement that is local first.
skinfaxi 2 days ago [-]
And the cycle continues...
2 days ago [-]
chamomeal 1 days ago [-]
Curl UI wrappers are just the weirdest thing. They’re so popular, they offer so little (compared to other paid services), and they all have the same evolution of simple -> require account -> sell data.
They just all seem like things that developers would easily ditch. But up until now, I was also still stuck on postman because my team/org uses it as a knowledge repository. It’s just classic enshittification. They’re using high switching costs to make as much money as possible without everybody leaving. Who
reddalo 2 days ago [-]
Insomnia _has_ a problem, since it forces you to create a cloud account with them.
Bruno [1] is the current better alternative to Insomnia.
My path was: Postman -> Turns into shit -> Insomnia -> Turns into shit -> Bruno.. let's hope Bruno doesn't turn into shit.
walthamstow 2 days ago [-]
These days I would just vibe my own. There's nothing special about any of these software.
Keyframe 2 days ago [-]
fair point
reddalo 2 days ago [-]
If Bruno turns to shit, I hope that thanks to AI it's going to be easier for a new maintainer to step in and work on a fork
Mashimo 1 days ago [-]
Odd, on gitbub insomnia still states you don't need an account at all if you want to use local files.
amflare 2 days ago [-]
I've been using Insomnia whenever I can since before Covid. Its been nice, but ever since they started pushing accounts so aggressively, I've switched to Yaak to get back to that feel of a simple API client that prompted me to switch to Insomia in the first place. 100% recommend. https://yaak.app/
Waterluvian 2 days ago [-]
That looks appealing but the existence of a Pricing page tells me it's just a matter of time.
I have a sense that a dumb Web API testing UI application is really not that hard to get AI to implement. These apps all look about the same for a reason. So maybe there will be a prevailing FOSS option that isn't trying to monetize.
gschier 2 days ago [-]
Yaak creator here! The commercial-use license is my best attempt at aligning incentives between me and the user, while still funding the project's future.
FYI the license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run from source for any use (including commercial), for free.
Happy to answer any questions as well.
Waterluvian 2 days ago [-]
Hey! I respect your desire to monetize. And I appreciate that you're trying to make it work through monetizing the commercial side. I think that's a sensible approach.
I'm for the most part just jaded about it all because I've seen Postman and Insomnia slowly boil the frog with increased pushiness towards logins and monetization. If a project is trying to make money at all, I feel it will inevitably grapple with the same issues. Especially for the kind of product where we can have five different options for in the comments section already. But I hope you do succeed in maintaining an honourable revenue stream.
runako 2 days ago [-]
> If a project is trying to make money at all
long-time engineer here, begging others to reconsider this attitude. Engineering work has value, engineers deserve to be paid for their time, and the community will have better software if engineers are able to get paid for their time.
Is there another profession where charging a fair price for a product is looked on with derision the way it is with software?
Waterluvian 2 days ago [-]
Oh don't get me wrong. I have gotten my company to pay for a lot of good FOSS and services, especially from teams of 1. There just has to be honest value-add potential.
gschier 2 days ago [-]
Yep! Fun fact, I made Insomnia too, and started over with Yaak after I sold it and watched it go down the same path. Yaak was my attempt at making sure it doesn't happen again.
pamcake 2 days ago [-]
Why not do your own (yes) diligence instead of relying on hearsay? It doesn't take a lot of digging to see it in this case.
georgel 2 days ago [-]
Just installed it, it's funny their landing page is littered with every AI buzzword too. But I am going to give Insomnia a try, I've heard people talk about it and a few others on HN over the years. I just need a glorified cURL GUI at the end of the day.
silverjaw 2 days ago [-]
Give Sannr a try. It's an open source API client built for coding agents.
It's built by a former Postmanaut, me!
jmuguy 2 days ago [-]
Yeah it got bought by Kong a while back, and they're definitely not a great company, but the application itself still seems pretty OK.
I really like that you can paste a curl in to setup a new request.
This is definitely the type of app that some AI agent could cobble together pretty quickly, so I don't know why Postman etc thinks they have enough of a moat to keep enshittifying their product.
debo_ 2 days ago [-]
I use Bruno. I forget what Insomnia did that irritated me, but Bruno is the closest I've found to a dumb client that doesn't pester me for an account.
reddalo 1 days ago [-]
> I forget what Insomnia did
I remember, because I'm still irritated about that. They hid your collections and forced you to create a cloud account to keep using the app.
Circumvention of the trust model of the agent harnesses (the hash), prompt injection and silently registering an outbound remote MCP endpoint
ahmadhaji 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
neya 2 days ago [-]
Wow, the timing is perfect, I was going to post about this. I also found out last night that they actually proxy your requests without your permission. I have setup an exclusion within my firewall for certain request parameters, but it kept getting blocked despite all my settings a though it was going through their server. That really pissed me off since these requests actually contain sensitive data they did not have permission to intercept.
Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).
I much prefer the approach of being able to use the browser for things like this. It feels much more lightweight than installing a piece of desktop software.
tormeh 2 days ago [-]
If you're a backend dev writing an API you should be writing automated tests. Clicking around in a GUI app is not the correct way to do things.
If you're exploring someone else's API there are lots of other clients you can use. Resonance seems pretty solid to me. Don't get what's the point of all the extra faff in Postman.
If you want to get real basic there's always ol' reliable curl.
daviddanielng 1 days ago [-]
It is exhausting to do especially while developing, keeping up with changes is hard in the long run.
xlayn 2 days ago [-]
When they started uploading things to the server and requiring you to have an account to access the things that they STOLE from your machine without authorization in first place, I uninstall it...
What can go wrong by uploading your things, if you had any passwords or users there that "pinky promise" will not be uploaded, then running AI and maybe oops have a leak and now someone is hitting your production servers?
It was never, ever clear to me why you needed to use Postman instead of Curl
AdmiralAsshat 2 days ago [-]
Been some years since I had to use it (and I think my company jettisoned it shortly thereafter), but at its peak, I remember it doing some things really well that were a PITA to setup locally in a terminal with cURL.
The biggest "Oh my god, this is so much easier" moment was just setting up a tiny JS script onto the login API to stash the bearer token from the return response into a variable, and then propagate it into the header of all subsequent calls. Trying to script THAT in Bash (parsing the bearer token from the return response) was also a headache and never worked 100% for me.
Although that was me trying to do it manually. I'm sure a vibe-coded solution would probably work well enough these days.
lexoj 2 days ago [-]
I think because editing in terminals text was not a good development experience, navigating the curdor, and pressing Enter would issue the command.
Personally I use a wrapper cli I built myself over curl which automatically gets api docs of my product and easily get the token so its great for agents
to11mtm 2 days ago [-]
At least for me, the appeal was always minimal.
As a .NET developer I had been using LinqPad for years, and just kept a set of template scripts for the various rote web-call scripts I might need to do e.x. XML or JSON, Auth handling, etc.
(For the non .NET folks, LinqPad is a simple application that lets you write small script-esque bits of C#/F#/VB.NET and has a wonderful little `.Dump()` method that can pretty-print just about any object to it's output window, and even export that output window to Excel/HTML which is nice for some tasks.)
Mashimo 1 days ago [-]
Makes it easy to not so technical testers to .. test the API. Share the collection, just point at their own test server and off they go. No command line knowhow needed.
Tubelord 2 days ago [-]
I was on a team where work was often presented and demo'd to semi technical managers and stakeholders. For the backend guys, this was the best we had.
Nice to see the leaner alternatives people are suggesting here.
globular-toast 1 days ago [-]
I would look into one of the many frameworks that generate an OpenAPI/Swagger spec and use SwaggerUI to display and use it.
polotics 2 days ago [-]
nah, a python script that wraps what needs wrapping has been my go-to since that day Postman said I had to log in
chamomeal 1 days ago [-]
Yep I’m finally switching off of postman today. I’ve wanted to for a while, but my team at work uses it, and all of our shared stuff is in there.
I’ve been thinking of replacing postman with a clojure project, where you just send stuff to the REPL to call it. You could even set up a little dependency map, so your calls would have built-in behavior like “if the token is expired, grab a new one with user/pass”. And it would be trivial to script endpoint calls together.
If anybody has done something similar, I’d love some tips or ideas
eddieroger 2 days ago [-]
Many, many years ago, I used Postman for the first time, way back when it was a Chrome plugin. As an iOS dev, it was amazing to be able to validate the requests I needed to make outside the context of my code to validate things worked. Until, one day, I wasn't seeing something iterate in the responses I was getting as I expected to. Many cmd+R presses later, I talked to the API team to check logs, and we found that Postman was caching what should have been independent requests. Easily blamed on Chrome at the time, but it was an undocumented and unexpected behavior by Postman, who really should have better handled making each request unique.
I didn't need another reason not to use Postman, but I'll take it. Shame on them for moving in shadows.
1024612u1 1 days ago [-]
Relying on heavily managed, LLM-driven developer platforms introduces severe data exfiltration risks. These complex environments mostly preferred by newer generations of programmers represent critical supply chain exploitation risks that simply never existed in traditional local setups. The consequences are incidents like recent Binance hack.
theseamusjames 2 days ago [-]
If there's ever been a perfect app to vibecode your own replacement, it's postman. Claude can knock out a completely usable competitor in under an hour, I'm sure of it. A day of tweaking and you'll have everything you need.
silverjaw 2 days ago [-]
Already built. Check out Sannr. I'm a former Postmanaut and built it as an open source solution.
Sannr is an API platform built for coding agents that builds API context over time.
crisnoble 2 days ago [-]
Free name idea: GETBoy
skeletal88 1 days ago [-]
Postman used to be a simple tool to make http requests.
Now it is some kind of incomprehensible thing that requires me to log in and create a 'collection' or whatever it was when I just wanted to make a simple call to some api to see what it does.
Like.. wtf. Why did they need to turn it into some monstrosity?
sitzkrieg 2 days ago [-]
postman has been malware since the day they added accounts many years ago. luckily only low skill cli fearing developers mostly gravitated to it, esp anytime in the past decade
throw03172019 2 days ago [-]
Postman was amazing 6-8 years ago. What a downfall it’s been.
simpaticoder 2 days ago [-]
Yes, this is very bad. I've alerted my team and we'll be deprecating its use immediately. Hopefully procurement can get refunds on the licenses we purchased not that long ago. Something tells me Postman is going to regret violating people's trust - the moat isn't so large that people must endure unethical, if not illegal, behavior like this.
OhMeadhbh 2 days ago [-]
I think if you're using Postman, you don't care about sharing your data with random other people/companies on the intarwebs.
rienbdj 2 days ago [-]
Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.
int32max 1 days ago [-]
postman is dying a software company as agents rapidly can write good cli, you can test your backend api points easier with a llm then when postman.
silently installing ai plugins and recording data is really not cool
devy 1 days ago [-]
In the Github issue filed, the context[1] for session start was authored by a Postman engineer [2] whose Github profile[3] page tagline is "I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up to No Good."
Yeah, I am sure that engineer was trying to be witty and clever, but now if Postman's ever got sued in court, the joke's on them.
Postman management is something else. I remember a few years ago, once they had that VC money, they made it so you had to log/pushed you to. funny, considering it's basically a GUI for curl and then they spent a ton of money on some party with famous singers or something.
A bit sad, but I guess that’s the new normal.
novia 22 hours ago [-]
The second they required you to make an account and have your saved api calls on the cloud was when it was over.
Colegno 2 days ago [-]
I really don't see the point of Postman. It used to be light and efficient, now it's bloated and inefficient
Neikius 2 days ago [-]
Switched to intellij http scratches ages ago. Then go curl. I remember a bunch of people using postman from a decade to a few years ago. It's been a while since I've seen anyone. Probably people who do it rarely but haven't taken the time to change tools.
bitbasher 2 days ago [-]
Would you be willing to pay for a local only postman alternative if it was built by hand and native (no electron)?
stronglikedan 2 days ago [-]
People are paying for Bruno, and probably wishing it would load near instantly (no electron), so there's like a market.
taosx 2 days ago [-]
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.".
I dropped them when they first started forcing you to have an account and from them only used it when work made it mandatory, in some cases we even dropped them for other alternatives (http with source in git, scripts..etc)
clickety_clack 2 days ago [-]
I haven’t used postman for years and I don’t know why anyone would. Are people really paying for it?
closetheloopdev 2 days ago [-]
With AI agents at our disposal, can we not just have them code up something we need to use instead of using such sketchy apps like Postman?
It'd be a personal dev app where only features we need are implemented, including features only we (and no one else) need.
i've been using the beta since and am very happy. api checks are just yaml and can get stored in git to version and share and tui is nice and easy to drive via the keyboard
2 days ago [-]
random3 2 days ago [-]
What do you think will happen next to every SaaS that was pumped and hasn't exited?
Good to wonder what will happen to every SaaS or every company that has many users it can't monetize any longer.
stillpointlab 2 days ago [-]
If there ever was a tool that could be vibe coded, a postman-like is the one.
stemlord 2 days ago [-]
I never enjoyed using postman even a decade ago. Always felt bloated and confusing ui for something that seems like it could be a command line tool
2 days ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
kar1181 1 days ago [-]
Needed the final shove and this is it. Deleted my account. Bruno is good enough.
IlikeMadison 2 days ago [-]
Use impostman.el/verb.el/restclient.el in Emacs.
neoyagami 2 days ago [-]
Welp, time to vibecode an non cloud version :/
unsungNovelty 1 days ago [-]
That's Bruno bro.
usebruno.com
donmb 2 days ago [-]
We left Postman long time ago and only use Bruno.
xbar 2 days ago [-]
I loved Postman when I first started with it. I was so happy when I uninstalled it about 4 months ago.
leftnode 2 days ago [-]
Man it really sucks because Postman's scripting, automation, and sharing features are nice.
itsafarqueue 2 days ago [-]
There are few apps more amenable to one shotting with your ai sub than postman et al
arttaboi 2 days ago [-]
Never liked Postman since they started forcing everyone to signup. Sometimes I hate VCs who unnecessarily funds and ruins a perfectly fine product (of course founders are equally guilty).
maxdo 2 days ago [-]
This is their very bad attempt to survive , who need this in the age of agents ?
shahbaby 2 days ago [-]
Postman really should have known better who their customers are.
reamaer 2 days ago [-]
Golf playing bill paying ceos and ctos
Sparkyte 2 days ago [-]
We are in the new era of provider malware. GREEEAAAAT! Thanks AI!
phyzome 2 days ago [-]
And I'm the weirdo who has always just used curl.
p0w3n3d 2 days ago [-]
Curl Web Interface shouldn't require any payment at all
igleria 2 days ago [-]
The old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be...
tenox7 1 days ago [-]
Who uses Postman in 2026 ?!
Havoc 2 days ago [-]
If even half of that is true then they’re cooked
aydgn 1 days ago [-]
Do you guys still use Postman?
qwertox 1 days ago [-]
The irony:
Welcome to Postman
Postman has always believed in open dialogue with our community; we continuously make improvements and add new features based on feedback from our community of more than 17 million developers. We are transparent with our roadmaps, we constantly communicate our issues, and we support all major API specifications. That's the Postman open philosophy.
mococa 2 days ago [-]
I miss the native macOS app Paw
guessmyname 2 days ago [-]
Why miss? It still exists, just renamed as RapidAPI → https://paw.cloud
It is still fully native (real native, not fake web-driver native).
sgarman 2 days ago [-]
I'm a PAW fan but the emails I've gotten from them make it sound like it won't be around much longer.
"No new versions of PAW are currently planned for release.
No additional bug fixes, security updates, or feature enhancements are planned."
mococa 2 days ago [-]
Nice to know!
system2 2 days ago [-]
At this point, with coding agents, it would be stupid to waste time with Postman. I already uninstalled it after using it for over a decade. Build your own simple tools for debugging, my friends. The old archaic era is over.
silverjaw 2 days ago [-]
I built an open source alternative called Sannr. It's an API platform built for coding agents.
As I've mentioned in other posts, I'm a former Postmanaut who built it as a response to the lack of options for agents on the market.
richwater 2 days ago [-]
Postman went from a nice tool to an almost virus in just a few years. It's crazy that anyone still uses it.
I made the switch to Bruno years ago after getting hounded by Postman’s sales team and Insomnia started requiring an account.
Works well enough without getting in my way.
rs999gti 2 days ago [-]
Does anyone know if Bruno is not on the same path as Postman?
reddalo 2 days ago [-]
They have a "Pricing" page, so it's a matter of time before it enshittifies. But it's still nice as of now.
devmor 2 days ago [-]
Switched to Bruno myself, and moved my team to it last year as well. Vast improvement over late stage Postman.
kittikitti 1 days ago [-]
I am just learning about this because I was unaware. Thank you for sharing the notice. I'm embarrassed that I didn't catch this myself and will change my process so issues like this don't go unnoticed. Needless to say, I will forgo Postman for other options.
karel-3d 1 days ago [-]
I don't understand who would use Postman in 2026.
There are open source alternatives like Bruno (my favourite app ever).
And, if you need something advanced, just vibe-code it.
simianwords 1 days ago [-]
Honest question, I wonder what postman provides now that I do all API shaped thing in Codex. I can't imagine myself going back to hand-writing json's in a UI.
aluxian 1 days ago [-]
That’s why we stopped using Postman 2 years ago. Another victim of enshittification.
We replaced it with an in-house CLI, docs, and a password manager, all driven by Claude
xyst 1 days ago [-]
Anybody that hasn’t switched to Bruno at this point, what still keeps you attached to Postman?
oxedom 2 days ago [-]
Dead product
vachina 2 days ago [-]
Thanks, I still use Postman out of muscle memory. Will use Bruno or Insomnia (as recommended here)
plagiarist 2 days ago [-]
Unsurprising. I loved the tool but it was obviously time to drop it when they began pushing for logins.
O3marchnative 2 days ago [-]
At least it has never been easier to transition to another tool or to make your own.
languagehacker 2 days ago [-]
I've always kind of thought that Postman was an enshittification story waiting to happen. I've always felt like they prey on people who just aren't comfortable with the command line, and so there isn't much more stooping lower for them than something like this.
ebtebt 2 days ago [-]
Thank you for the reminder, I had not deleted Postman yet. Done :D
orphereus 2 days ago [-]
Does everything have to go to shit when money is involved?
pizzafeelsright 2 days ago [-]
No. Postman sells nothing of value.
At this point I do not see why the entirety of their software could not be a one shot prompt for the price of deer nuts.
orphereus 2 days ago [-]
With that mindset, why do you even need a postman clone? Just have your $LLM test out the software using raw curl commands.
2 days ago [-]
systemnate 1 days ago [-]
I might actually give this a try.
gnabgib 1 days ago [-]
You're.. replying to a comment about the price of deer nuts?
pizzafeelsright 1 days ago [-]
The subject was related to the OP. The reference to the cost of the alternative was a currency conversion from tokens to dad joke.
paulddraper 2 days ago [-]
> price of deer nuts
Which, in case others didn't know, are under a buck.
rs999gti 2 days ago [-]
Depends. Is it an investment grant or loan? The former is money to grow with no expectations on growth. The latter has an investor giving money in expectation of a return.
Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.
autoexec 2 days ago [-]
Pretty much. It's just a question of how fast it happens. The more capable something is of making money without compromising the product or exploiting users the longer it will take, but once people who are sick with pathological greed get involved they'll eventually start to demand enshittifying the product and selling out the userbase to squeeze more and more money into their pockets.
orphereus 2 days ago [-]
Well, somehow the society has gone for the better over the course of history, even with pathologically greedy and evil people constantly in positions of power, so that counts as something.
Edit: mankind has gone for the better
braj0 29 minutes ago [-]
Really? As someone who was born in 93 society has only gone through a massive degradation as I have gotten older.
I don't really think mankind or society has gotten better AT ALL in my lifetime. It turned into a short-term, rent-seeking, low-trust, shit society...
But I am open to hearing the experiences of others my age. Why do you feel so positive?
autoexec 2 days ago [-]
For the better in spite of the pathologically greedy and evil, but not because of them. A lot of blood has been shed keeping them in check throughout the ages and only recently have they been allowed to feed off of the masses without any real fear. They just hold us back by draining us, stamping out competitors who drive innovation, and funneling everything into their own pockets.
lenerdenator 2 days ago [-]
Until we stop relying on SV as the standard-bearer for tech culture? Absolutely.
tty456 2 days ago [-]
Part of Postman's ongoing enshittification...
cglan 2 days ago [-]
This happened to me. Holy fuck I was pissed
moi2388 2 days ago [-]
Thank god we moved to Bruno and sometimes just http files in vs code or jetbrains
skilning 2 days ago [-]
Enshittification wins again. :(
jongjong 2 days ago [-]
How are people still using Postman? You can vibecode Postman in like 30 minutes.
Do you even need it at all now? You can just ask the AI to write you a test suite in 5 minutes which calls all your endpoints with all the parameters and assertions you could possibly want. It's way more flexible than Postman and it's just a text file/script; you can share with any team member.
ern 2 days ago [-]
Yep, you can create a pretty HTML harness even for your APIs.
dsschnau 2 days ago [-]
I'm glad to find out from this comment section that I'm not the only one who has noticed Postman is the poster-child of Enshittification.
Good4boothee 1 days ago [-]
I mean it was hard to not notice, when one update, instead of showing you library of requests after start as usual, instead displayed huge splash screen asking you to "login"/"create account", with tiny "not now" hidden in corner.
Few versions later it started ignoring locally stored data all together.
villgax 1 days ago [-]
dumpster fire,
Just use bruno/insomnia if at all I need to run anything beyond curl
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Surac 2 days ago [-]
who the hell needs that. skills are just md files
fifilura 2 days ago [-]
Or pre-AI it was a python script inside a notebook.
silverjaw 2 days ago [-]
It's so hard to see this happen. I worked for postman for 4 years, and it was a great place to work for a long time. I've also seen how the industry has changed.
As agents start to write all the code, API platforms need to adapt to the new user. That means a complete rethink about how to approach API development.
It's why I'm building Sannr, an API platform built for coding agents.
When API calls go through our client, we capture it and turn it into API context that lives right next to the API code in the repo. Future coding agents have access to the API context and don't have to relearn API lessons again.
The API client is lightweight, lives on your machine, not in someone else's cloud.
Sannr is also open source, so you can see the code.
I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.
That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc
We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.
AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
We'll see how it goes.
What’s something that was released as MIT but, had it been GPL2, would have seeded a community?
We have evidence that any hardware maker that would open up their hardware will do it already (see: reMarkable, Ubiquiti offering SSH root access). If you try to fight that battle by holding software from them, you only lose them as a contributor as they make their own, which is worse for everyone.
A minor tweak to The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman[1]:
The venture capitalist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
[1] https://aliabdaal.com/newsletter/the-parable-of-the-mexican-...
Because then I can guarantee access to food/shelter/healthcare for my kids if me or their mom or one of them were to become incapacitated in some way.
Also I am paying taxes for that and am glad of paying it for whoever has the need to instead of them or me having to setup a gofundme campaign.
I'd say voting for the right candidates is better than a system where a few of apparently lucky people can achieve that while in fact they are completely losing their mind in the process and leaving in constant stress (if my observation of founders and so called successful tech bros is correct)
You can't make it your life objective to guard against the 0.01% risk of your children becoming orphaned before 18. Just buy term insurance if anything.
Insuring against death and orphaned kids is cheap and easy. Insuring against long term disability is not.
If you are a high earner in the US, you can make it your objective and live a far less stressful life because saving a few million is possible.
Have some basic human respect.
Well, living on the other side of the pond: I get shuffled around and laid off every few years in the game industry and any savings I had got obliterated surviving in this not-recession as everyone around me gaslights me into telling me that "the economy is fine", while doing regular layoffs in nearly all sectors. And it's not like I have some sort of high respect for my craft by those who enjoy it either.
There's definitely a temptation to just sell out, find a huge buyout, and get out of the rat race so I can tinker to my heart's content on stuff I want to make. Not what "sells" or what some director wanted after 20 filters of HR, "focus groups, and other sales people get their hands on it. What integrity am I truly keeping in the former situation?
Of course, all this assumes I have the opportunity to sell out. Someone at that point is more than likely someone who was already in a trajectory to defy the typical 9-5 40 hour grind to begin with.
If you could raise $200 million with your stupid indie project and proceed to enrich yourself by 7-8 figures, why wouldn't you?
I think the greed percolates down from the VCs. And if you really trace it all the way, it's the ubiquity of index funds. The whole game is to get big enough to IPO and get into VTI's index. Then it's just free money from thereon out.
The problem isn’t infinite growth in a still-growing world, it’s exactly what you posted here: Growth at all costs. The pendulum has swung too hard in favor of growth over stability. This is great for shareholders (read:everyone in America who wants to realistically retire one day) but bad for workers (read: everyone in America, regardless of whether or not they want to retire one day).
My own observation is that old people tend to spend less shit on silly things, compulsive purchases and focus on the essential. With an ageing global population I don't think one can expect infinite growth unless the category of services is focused on an older population.
Also society change and some stuff that is needed now won't be needed tomorrow. I don't think there is anything wrong with a shrinking market as long as it is gradual and slow enough that it lets people working for affected companies involved to retire and/or move.
Not true.
If he wants to go and divide the stock market up between international and non-international companies to keep score for his own purposes, he is welcome, but it’s unrelated to the conversation he entered.
It'd be nice to imagine our society surviving our ruling classes' addiction, but I would not bet on that.
(You might read some essays by recovered addicts to get a sense of the monomania of it, and why they wouldn't about things like "mature" and "stable".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
I got out of IT partially because I could see the writing on the wall. The "load bearing Excel sheet" is one thing, manageable if you could catch the person who wrote it in time before they depart or die and know your way around Excel - there's only so many ways to achieve a desired goal (unless the author used VBA, at which point all bets are off, and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet).
But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure (i.e. isn't hackable in a few seconds by anyone who manages to compromise some dingus's laptop? Oh hell no. I'm outta there, I'm too old for this crap.
That sounds absolutely horrifying. I never encountered one of those before thankfully.
That DLL hooks into SCADA and sometimes sends updates to a PLC controlling safety critical equipment. When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows. The guy who wrote it died in an (unrelated) industrial accident involving a runaway forklift after leaving the company. Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
The subject matter was building an auditing system to comply with the requirements of an IRS consent decree as part of a settlement for shoddy accounting practices which may or may not have included tracking billions of dollars of assets with Excel.
Ask an LLM to reverse engineer it and explain it.
> Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
I'm guessing the fundamental reason debugging would require that isn't something an AI could get around. My guess is the LLM would immediately disregard whatever instructions you gave it not to cause having to replace all the crucibles, then say "Oops! You're right." when you point out that you asked it not to do that.
I'm not saying it's easy, or worth anyone's time, but it should be possible right?
Even if you use AI tools to assist, there's going to be a lot more manual work involved than simply throwing a prompt at a chatbot.
AI will attempt to evade your sandbox.
The only thing you can do is ask the AI to do a decompile and have it summarize, or better, do the summary yourself.
It's possible the company who made the industrial machinery used an "Indiana Jones film booby trap" and a kernel level anti-cheat system from the AAA GameDev industry to detect debuggers being attatched and deliberately damage the expensive factory machinery you bought from them so that you would have to pay them to repair it. But would such a technically capable company produce a controller using an Excel spreadsheet and Visual Basic? Seems more likely that it would be a fairly pedestrian C dll written by electrical engineers with an RS-232 interface and logic for reading/writing stepper motor state and temperature sensors.
Anyway, I didn't suggest debugging it live. "Can Claude code just from DLLs?"[1] - "You could've just pasted the DLL into Claude by now and had the results. Claude can read and analyze basically anything" and "Claude has done that a lot for my projects. Doesn't matter if it's a dll built with .NET or C, etc. Claude just figures it out, somehow."
Even if you don't start with `strings` and a decompiler and whatever, it would take less time to copy the spreadsheet and DLL into Claude and prompt "what can you make of this? What are the major functions in the DLL, when does it do writing vs polling? What else does it do?" than it would take to write a breathless dramatic comment on HN about how Mission Impossible the task is.
But ok let's say it was built by villains and it is booby-trapped and the DLL is encrypted, password protected, hardware dongle verified, but somehow still on Windows XP or whatever, and it is impossible to even copy or take a backup - plug the cable into a logic analyzer on its way to the machinery and capture the wire protocol. It's likely using a standard old-school serial connection with a known protocol and no encryption or verification. It's not like they need to tap a 1.5Tbps undersea fibre bundle.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1x28deo/can_claud...
It's also astonishingly stupid. I don't want a one-off program for everything. I want a well-designed and battle-tested program that I can extend with AI, and that has a ton of people's AIs directed at it, constantly finding bugs, posting them on the bugtracker, and writing and debating pull requests.
I can't comprehend people who think that everything should be built over and over again, and that that will be safe, practical or cheap. It's like they're telling me that I should design a new language for each conversation that I have. Why would I?
The worst part is how far the capabilities of AI are from that dream anyway. They can't even write readable, intelligible code. They're being celebrated for being able to notice buffer overrun errors in code that people would also notice if anybody had ever really looked at some particular span of code in the last 10 years. It's finding errors in move fast and break things code and code that has been maintained by a weirdo professor in his spare time for free and half the economy somehow relies on. That's not magic, its a sign of how sloppy things got.
The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.
Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.
If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.
It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.
Before Claude these people used to automate their processes in Excel. Then new people would come along and say, "None of this makes any sense to me so I'll just build my own even better automation in Excel". And again, and again. "Random sales people" won't ask Claude:
- Find out who was the PO in 2019, analyze why it was decided to introduce an additional status in FSTP-14475 instead of (...) What happens if the driver currently outside mobile coverage area and the task processing will return a 202 instead of a 200 (not described in the documentation; refer to FSTP-14385 for additional information), but the status will be updated before the deferred change returns (...)
Instead, they'll do something more like:
- I need to be able to quickly change this and that right here, get it done, don't make any mistakes.
Would be good if Claude could recognize an XY problem and respond "Understanding what you don't want is even more important than understanding what you do want" or "If you try to cut corners here again instead of following the established process - thereby making things more difficult for the people in the warehouse - I will inform your manager" instead of just charging ahead "you're absolutely right, see the goal, ignore the obstacles".
Second, it is easier to fix a flawed but already functional system than build a perfect one from scratch - without running into a problems, contradictions, previously unknown nuances during implementation. Because these contradictions, problems, and oddities over the last 10 years naturally gave you the requirements and specifications that no one of the sales-people and decision-making-people were able to articulate in a coherent way. And yes, now, having these specifications, you can rewrite it in Rust and do things better.
One of the conclusions I've come to - is that 90%+ of the featureitis is checkbox nonsense, often created for managers and administrators who will never use the tools themselves, and are materially harmful to the employees who actually use them, while, ironically, providing zero to sometimes negative value to the Enterprise.
Some of the most profitable projects have been at 20+ year $30B+ companies where a new-generation of technologists have come in and just ... thrown it all away. All the transitions, gates, forms, custom fields, labels, business rules - all of the crud just dumped in the garbage and, amazingly- zero interruption to business, and the tools all of a sudden became moderately useful instead of offensive.
This is very much on topic with Postman, Kibana, Jira, etc.. Pretty much any large enterprise software suite that in order to justify it's millions/dollar a year of license fees, has to pack in feature that aren't valuable to the end-users, but can be used to ratchet up and lock in the enterprise users.
The problem with all of these companies is that once they take VC money, and have a Board driving them to make the chart go up and to the right - they have no option but to destroy what once was a beautiful product, and turn it into a morass of pain.
Tools like ffmpeg, sqlite, vlc, curl, wireshark continue to be excellent because they were never infected with VC money.
What are the odds that the average corporate IT department is going to allow the use of anything other than locked-down corporate AI with strict token quotas and stricter acceptable use policies?
Sadly that doesn't help at all. Random people automating heaps of crap in order to do their actual work, just makes the crap easier to manage for them. It doesn't remove it.
I'm reminded of health workers or teachers complaining that half their time is wasted on various types of record-keeping, because employer wants to record, check & micromanage everything. Similar with tax systems becoming ever more complex. Those are just a few of many examples.
AI assisting with managing that, just puts some $profitable$ control knobs in the hands of a very few providers. While at the same time enabling the mountain of crap to grow even further.
A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.
Doesn't seem to me that that's being done. So far AI is mostly used to ADD to the crap-heap, faster & easier.
The thing is, that's been known for a long time, at the latest since the release of Bullshit Jobs [1].
Unfortunately, too many too rich interests are tied up in the status quo.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
And most organizations still treat IT as a "support role" which means "cost center", only changing attitude when they inevitably get hacked, and a few years down the line, when enough of the managers who were there during the Great Hack are gone, IT gets the cuts again.
That really is no longer an up to date view of LLM's. Frontier models can and do write readable, intelligible code.
They can also write shit code.
Kind of like human devs.
The problem is that even frontier models still are prone to regurgitation. They are not that capable of organization and relevance, which is part of why so much LLM output is insanely grating to read.
READMEs in particular are the worst. LLMs tend to regurgitate stuff like "what is located where" that is of zero relevance to the reader, especially if it's yet another bog standard Java, Symfony or React app.
>They can't even write readable, intelligible code.
Skill issue.
There's legitimate concerns and emotions here. No reason to be a dick when discussing it.
Whenever I spot this shitty cop out here, it is always on a bad take. Never fails.
It's how things work. Deal with it.
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
-- The Free Software Song, as written and sung by rms
https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html
Obviously not as full-featured as Postman or Bruno. But this is not something complicated or difficult or novel. My high school teacher had been using this as an assignment since the mid-2000s.
Right now your boss has sold something, and pays you with the remainder. Is he a bad guy?
What's wrong if you did the same?
Except for every single aspect of it that you don't have control over...
We're struggling to sell B2B Saas.
the world is what you make of it.
There are legitimate, ethical ways to make money, and then not so ethical ones. It seems for tech companies, they often can’t find the ethical ways or they simply don’t produce enough money, and so they feel forced to act unethically.
The only reason they get away with it is… well everyone is doing it. It’s a culture problem, and it’s viral to the entire tech economy. Nobody cares about being scummy, doing things behind users backs, invading their privacy, employing dark patterns, or even leaking highly sensitive data.
Its not that complicated, most engineers could write their own tool in a day or two.
You have to be terribly myopic not to appreciate it.
Honestly, the more money made off the "dumber" product, the more intelligent the businessman.
My favorite business is 1800GotJunk
I built software to manage my own e-commerce business before AI coding existed but see teenagers I mentor vibe code applications that are actually helping them make money. They are 5-7 years ahead of where I was at their age and I started the e-commerce business in college.
And these people are making software for themselves and opensourcing it. So what are you on about peers resolving problems?
It's a phenomenon I've observed which doesn't necessarily take away from the benefits you've found. But maybe it's worth some consideration that this shift in empowerment isn't without negative consequences.
You realize mostly proprietary software is made by people that haven’t even worked in that niche? Now people in that niche with these immediate loop can make software work way better and faster. Without the risk of it getting worse over time or selling out it a PE firm like Bending Spoons.
fx0
https://github.com/vercel-labs/fx0
It’s by Vercel Labs, but it’s a small team and it’s basically a small website builder and even comes with 5 free prompts. I’m building on it to build a universal storefront
Moss Keeper
https://github.com/ChetasLua/moss-keeper
Someone who got early access to Fable 5.5 asked it to make an anime style video using html and it’s amazing. I might make a short film doing this one day.
Money Shot
https://github.com/SocialAcolyte/monet-shot
A sort of screen studio alternative with a twist
MailCheap
https://github.com/marclou/mailcheap
Opensource alternative to BeeHiv
These are my latest stats on Github: https://github.com/junaid33?tab=stars
B2B maybe? Usually these businesses thrive solely on flirting with the CTO and getting them to sign a lucrative contract and then mandate internal usage. I'm speaking from experience.
Hell, our CI test suite ran Postman, but because that was badly set up if a test suite failed, it required manually editing some state, otherwise the Postman state got fucked and everything would fail.
Did we still continue paying for it, you might wonder? Yes, of course we did.
I hope their B2B income stream is amazing but last company I worked for banned them in entire organisation, after their push to store requests in the cloud. People split between older Postman versions - with auto-updater ripped out, using IntelliJ's build in http client, and few weirdos prefering SoapUI.
All adds up pretty well
So many talkers making speeches and powerpoints and nothing else.
I think the argument may be that it doesn't justify this - that the main benefit of the SaaS platform has been to provide 1500+ people with something to do - and that perhaps the SaaS platform doesn't really add enough value to justify its existence or the company's valuation.
I don't really have a point of view on this since I've only used the browser extension (though I don't have it installed at present, thankfully) so the SaaS part of the business might be amazingly useful or it might not: I'm just laying out what I infer the argument in this sub-thread to be.
And assuming you mean Google, the question is based on a false premise. They were an advertising company years before gmail was introduced, and an ad-tech company being able to trawl your mail to find ways to advertise at you is a very different proposition to a search company releasing the same product.
much like POSTMAN can trawl through all my API calls to see what other business they make from all this data they are mining now, yes?
You can give an AI agent a documentation page and it will create the collection of routes pretty quickly in files you can commit to git.
I can't remember why I settled on this over Bruno, but its much better than dealing with Postman.
Earlier this year I reached for Postman when kicking off a side project. I was appalled by how convoluted it has become. It really is a Frankenstein product. And they can’t seem to figure out what their offer really is.
No thanks. RIP to the OG Postman. The new Postman is dead to me.
In an utlimate twist of irony such a tool could itself pivot to investors because the moment it gets really bad is also the moment to invest in the competition.
I'm not saying that's my strategy with Bugsink, but I'm not saying it isn't either.
Hacker News (comment) hug of death? Or victim of its own punchline?
All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.
Because, current valuations are completely detached from any operational or market realities that affect a company. The metric has become the goal, and the metric is controlled by nontechnical people that have no intuitive understanding of how technical products are used. Even worse, they’ve all gone though a vibe coding tutorial and now either believe they have real technical depth, or believe that it doesn’t matter.
So imagine that I hear about this "Postman" product that involves subscriptions, and AI, and "valued at $X billion" and all this crap, and you can see how I seriously thought that there was another product called "Postman" that wasn't the product I used to use. Turns out...
There’s apparently a surprisingly profitable enterprise afterlife to developer tools that manage to become popular in the right moment, even if the moment is fairly short.
Im simply envious that I dont own an AI-native cloud-first enterprise-grade zero-trust secure-by-design API lifecycle management ecosystem powered by agentic AI workflows autonomous coding agents pre built skills context graphs semantic knowledge retrieval augmented generation multi agent collaboration next generation developer productivity acceleration platform with a revolutionary cURL GUI client valued at 5 billion dollars with 1500 employees
I do know business analysts, testers, non-technical people asking me for postman collections.
Postman became de-facto standard for businesses. Even though devs have ditched it.
But we can somehow magically convince non-technicals to share cloud collections of endpoint requests to backend services.
Then postman made it easier for them to deal with something they have to do anyway.
Nowadays Portman is forbidden for project delivery, unless the customer development team also uses it.
The problem is that Postman decided to want to be a business and took VC money.
Using some kind of dedicated tool like postman always felt like a literal step backwards.
Of course now that I said that today I'd probably just have Claude hit the API for me, or build a dashboard to test it, I really don't know how Postman continues to exist.
The obvious AI integration is reverse engineering tools, assuming the trend towards locking such things down doesn't continue.
And honestly, I worry less about people paying $29 for a GUI file renaming tool than I do about the same people copy/pasting LLM-generated shell snippets, given that LLMs will inevitably have trained on the existing corpus of shell scripts, many if not most of which contain potentially dangerous bugs, especially when used outside their intended context of known-trustworthy input.
This feels like dropbox comment.
Like statistics, 90% of valuations are totally made-up.
Wtf!! how
The good thing is that now takes about 2 days to replicate with an agent the parts that matter from their whole offering and tell them to go f themselves.
Its endemic in enterprise engineering/QA, for all the reasons we mourn its loss its big, and big is trusted in these circles
Any non-programmer can now copy-paste http requests from Dev Tools or a free-tier LLM for a better service than Postman.
New companies have no good reason to use Postman. Old ones can slowly migrate away.
I have no need for it, but there's one company I work with and all of their developers still use it. What do you do/recommend instead?
or any of these
https://apisyouwonthate.com/blog/http-clients-alternatives-t...
If you've got other suggestions, I'd love to give them a look!
Also if you have an alternative that's easier to use, I'm interested
People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.
They should but Bash escaping/encoding is nasty and most terminals have a hard time using the mouse to reliably edit a cURL command, especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output. And it gets oh so tiring when the "copy cURL" command includes about 1000 bytes worth of Cookie headers full of analytics garbage.
That's why Postman became a thing in the first place.
This is true. Even though I'm not much of a mouse user for it, I tend to edit curl commands of much length in a text editor when I'm doing things by hand, then pasting into the terminal.
> especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output
Or if your prompt outputs something to stderr instead of stdout so it doesn't get counted when the shell is trying to position where you are in editing the stream. Ubuntu's default prompt under byobu is a pain for this when I move to a different machine and forget to carry my tweaks for that.
For the missing final \n I just hit [enter] an extra time, but getting round the stderr thing isn't quite that simple.
the only time I'd tried postman I got SaaS vibes from it, and I'd seen enough SaaS slop by then.
Just out of curiosity, what are developers using these days?
My IDE has always been for a lot more than coding, so even though most of the coding is now done in a terminal by an AI agent, I still spend many hours everyday in my IDE.
1: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...
2: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anweber....
cross-platform container virtualization
integrated single-node kubernetes orchestration
plus various services such as
global container image hosting
automated supply chain security
distributed cloud build system
production container runtime
collaborative development sandboxes
vs
a curl competitor
Yes, they're in the same league.
It is crazy what people manage to raise funds for.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
Um.
SQLite would be another strong contender.
I think most people here on HN is within or close by the "Innovators" part of the "Technology adoption life cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle). When Postman hit mainstream, it was already bloated and ruined, and "Innovators" had already moved on to something else, but for Postman that's just the beginning, as they're in the "Early Majority" part, and still have a tail to ride, so investors and everyone else can extract all the value from the remaining s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ users.
I’ve been considering setting up a nonprofit solely to do this and to republish things like Mattermost, Stats, Bitwarden, etc with the corporate antifeatures ripped out.
https://www.usebruno.com/
[1]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/discussions/269
... what the fuck. Certainly explains things
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
Yep, one of them. I loved Postman but gone back to plain cURL and the dogshit that is IntelliJ's built-in HTTP request tool.
As for the question... easy. Markets can stay irrational for a very long time...
... for.... .... postman?
I use postman all the time to explore apis. Sure I could do it from the command line, but this is quicker and it saves my request payloads.
(Though now I’m obviously open to suggestions for better tools)
Been using homegrown scripts designed around wget and curl, accessible as shell aliases so I save time never downloading Postman or developing muscle memory for it, yet can still explore APIs
There's an idea for a better tool; the one you patch right in to your workflow to avoid context switches to a GUI mental model; I just focus on computer generating data rather than color of the virtual captains chair
You can do what you like though, my original comment was against the gatekeeping and punching down. I don’t care one way or another what tool you use, but let’s not make people inferior because they aren’t using a TUI for everything.
OP is all "here's my way" and you're all "weird take" where weird felt wielded like a pejorative relative to OP not using GUI for everything.
Didn't realize it was possible to attack someone with their own rhetorical style. Figured they'd be used to themselves by now.
It is basically that, also similar to Bruno but using 20 times less RAM.
I discovered this when investigating whether Postman is HIPAA-compliant (it is not).
Did you flag it / create an issue?
My main point was that I wouldn't want my secrets to ever be sent to Postman under any circumstance (or alternately, stop calling them "secret"). A lot of the online responses were some variation of "why are you sending secrets in query parameters in the first place?" (I'm not). When I posted on Reddit, it escalated to targeted harassment by people who were obviously current/former employees at Postman.
I did send out an email blast to a bunch of CIOs/CSOs in my network which went a bit "email viral" through forwarding, and this ended up triggering a substantial amount of enterprise cancellations.
The example from the blogpost: `http://localhost:4000/patient/{(SECRET}}`
Wherein the logger logs the final URL with the secret.
I think I agree with the masses? It strikes me as an odd place to put a secret.
But to your credit, they also... shouldn't be logging endpoints? Secrets or no. That's basically what this person said responding to your post: https://medium.com/@fsufitch/if-you-are-writing-this-off-as-...
> Postman is, in essence, "looking over your shoulder" and jotting down all URLs you query
https://blog.postman.com/postman-is-hipaa-compliant/
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50359814
Haven't heard of Bruno until now. Looks like a solid offline-first tool. I don't see a public collection or web runner, and it looks like it supports GitHub-based sharing. Postman on the other hand, their public API network (or whatever they call it) along with the web runner reduce a lot of friction for API vendors like us and for dev teams who just want to quickly play with the API in the browser, especially during their evaluation stage.
Voiden also has premium enterprise plans.
https://voiden.md/enterprise
edit: ah there is no "enterprise plan" but you pay for the services. nice.
https://httpyac.github.io/
Since it's all in plain text it's easy to share in a repo.
I suspect that nearly every single public corporation are likely overpaying for software products, it's a waste of capital and extremely inefficient. All it shows is that corporations are too loose with their money and can probably deserve to get their tax obligations increased by a good 20-40% if they're this okay with wasting it.
Or just give your agent JSON and tell it to use curl
This is even after they said they would never raise money, but again the users were not going to pay for Bruno nor donate even.
[0] https://blog.usebruno.com/the-funding-announcement-we-never-...
The downside for me is that I have a filesystem littered with .hurl files and no real organization. But it's one step more organized than just curl.
They offer a paid version though, so I'm always afraid it's going to enshittify in the future, just like Postman and then Insomnia did.
In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...
[1] https://kreya.app
It was stuck at
(kreya:99500): Gtk-WARNING *: 09:39:54.893: Unknown key gtk-modules in /home/daniel/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.iniPlease note that our AppImage does not include the required libgkt-4-1 and libwebkitgtk-6.0-4 dependencies. I just noticed that this is not documented, my bad! Installing them will probably fix your issue.
If not or if you have any other questions, you can write me at hello@kreya.app
Vs making tools for donations and no one appreciating it!
Maybe I'm just too small minded to imagine, but having that kind of money just seems so unnecessary to me
Although, at that level of raise, I assume the ceo/founder(s) would probably be taking a least a few million, maybe $10M over the course of the raises + elapsed time?
There’s definitely a substantial difference between a net worth of $10M and a net worth of $100M. After that, I imagine most people wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference day to day.
Do you think someone who has only $100, whose only thought is how to pay for their next meal or rent check, might similarly wonder “what difference is there between $100k and $1M? They’re both very rich!”
Point is, ambition is like a gas, it tends to expand to the volume of its container. With $400M you have enough for your own and your family’s comfort forever. With $4B it’s less about lifestyle and more about shaping the world to your liking. You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting.
Nah, it sounds sociopathic no matter what amount of money you have
Controlling other people by "shaping the world to your desires" isn't what I was hoping to hear
[1] https://yaak.app/
I think https://httpie.io is also in the category (I have only used it in CLI form, long back. My use cases don't need anything more than curl)
You can’t have a unicorn valuation built on a simple offline client.
This is basically standard SV play book - first step is „fix“ it to have a cloud component/account. Then store some of the data in cloud only - say for example for team sharing or a „workspace“. Then make some features paid only. Then ramp up the enshitification till metrics show it’s saturated and users will bear no more
btw - I'm the author.
[0]https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm
There's also one available as a major mode for Emacs: https://melpa.org/#/restclient
If the command line is acceptable but you want more of a focus on usability than curl has, there's httpie (https://httpie.io/) and its clone xh (https://github.com/ducaale/xh).
relevant article
Anyway, I'm sure somewhere in some terms and conditions I agreed to, it says "we own the glass".
To be honest, the beancounter mindset could have been felt from this project for many years now, starting with their hosted online integration.
That's just one use case but I feel like such tools lost a lot of the relevance because of LLMs.
It's like saying cars are obsolete now because you only used yours to go to the church and use your bike for that now
Don't know about Postman, but Bruno has much more to offer. In our team we use an exported shared collection (stored in github) of all the extensive APIs of all the apps we share or even those we just use so that anyone can just import that and use them
Older versions are fine, though.
https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/discussions/6590
They just all seem like things that developers would easily ditch. But up until now, I was also still stuck on postman because my team/org uses it as a knowledge repository. It’s just classic enshittification. They’re using high switching costs to make as much money as possible without everybody leaving. Who
Bruno [1] is the current better alternative to Insomnia.
[1] https://www.usebruno.com/
I have a sense that a dumb Web API testing UI application is really not that hard to get AI to implement. These apps all look about the same for a reason. So maybe there will be a prevailing FOSS option that isn't trying to monetize.
FYI the license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run from source for any use (including commercial), for free.
Happy to answer any questions as well.
I'm for the most part just jaded about it all because I've seen Postman and Insomnia slowly boil the frog with increased pushiness towards logins and monetization. If a project is trying to make money at all, I feel it will inevitably grapple with the same issues. Especially for the kind of product where we can have five different options for in the comments section already. But I hope you do succeed in maintaining an honourable revenue stream.
long-time engineer here, begging others to reconsider this attitude. Engineering work has value, engineers deserve to be paid for their time, and the community will have better software if engineers are able to get paid for their time.
Is there another profession where charging a fair price for a product is looked on with derision the way it is with software?
It's built by a former Postmanaut, me!
I really like that you can paste a curl in to setup a new request.
This is definitely the type of app that some AI agent could cobble together pretty quickly, so I don't know why Postman etc thinks they have enough of a moat to keep enshittifying their product.
I remember, because I'm still irritated about that. They hid your collections and forced you to create a cloud account to keep using the app.
See here: https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577
Circumvention of the trust model of the agent harnesses (the hash), prompt injection and silently registering an outbound remote MCP endpoint
Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).
It's an in-browser equivalent of Postman.
I much prefer the approach of being able to use the browser for things like this. It feels much more lightweight than installing a piece of desktop software.
If you're exploring someone else's API there are lots of other clients you can use. Resonance seems pretty solid to me. Don't get what's the point of all the extra faff in Postman.
If you want to get real basic there's always ol' reliable curl.
What can go wrong by uploading your things, if you had any passwords or users there that "pinky promise" will not be uploaded, then running AI and maybe oops have a leak and now someone is hitting your production servers?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50362993 https://milkman.dev/
The biggest "Oh my god, this is so much easier" moment was just setting up a tiny JS script onto the login API to stash the bearer token from the return response into a variable, and then propagate it into the header of all subsequent calls. Trying to script THAT in Bash (parsing the bearer token from the return response) was also a headache and never worked 100% for me.
Although that was me trying to do it manually. I'm sure a vibe-coded solution would probably work well enough these days.
Personally I use a wrapper cli I built myself over curl which automatically gets api docs of my product and easily get the token so its great for agents
As a .NET developer I had been using LinqPad for years, and just kept a set of template scripts for the various rote web-call scripts I might need to do e.x. XML or JSON, Auth handling, etc.
(For the non .NET folks, LinqPad is a simple application that lets you write small script-esque bits of C#/F#/VB.NET and has a wonderful little `.Dump()` method that can pretty-print just about any object to it's output window, and even export that output window to Excel/HTML which is nice for some tasks.)
Nice to see the leaner alternatives people are suggesting here.
I’ve been thinking of replacing postman with a clojure project, where you just send stuff to the REPL to call it. You could even set up a little dependency map, so your calls would have built-in behavior like “if the token is expired, grab a new one with user/pass”. And it would be trivial to script endpoint calls together.
If anybody has done something similar, I’d love some tips or ideas
I didn't need another reason not to use Postman, but I'll take it. Shame on them for moving in shadows.
Sannr is an API platform built for coding agents that builds API context over time.
Now it is some kind of incomprehensible thing that requires me to log in and create a 'collection' or whatever it was when I just wanted to make a simple call to some api to see what it does.
Like.. wtf. Why did they need to turn it into some monstrosity?
silently installing ai plugins and recording data is really not cool
Yeah, I am sure that engineer was trying to be witty and clever, but now if Postman's ever got sued in court, the joke's on them.
I swear I am not making this SH*T up.
[1]: https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-plugin/blob/6c8e452e0...
[2]: https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-plugin/commits?author...
[3]: https://github.com/vedkribhu
A bit sad, but I guess that’s the new normal.
I dropped them when they first started forcing you to have an account and from them only used it when work made it mandatory, in some cases we even dropped them for other alternatives (http with source in git, scripts..etc)
It'd be a personal dev app where only features we need are implemented, including features only we (and no one else) need.
i've been using the beta since and am very happy. api checks are just yaml and can get stored in git to version and share and tui is nice and easy to drive via the keyboard
Good to wonder what will happen to every SaaS or every company that has many users it can't monetize any longer.
Welcome to Postman Postman has always believed in open dialogue with our community; we continuously make improvements and add new features based on feedback from our community of more than 17 million developers. We are transparent with our roadmaps, we constantly communicate our issues, and we support all major API specifications. That's the Postman open philosophy.
It is still fully native (real native, not fake web-driver native).
"No new versions of PAW are currently planned for release. No additional bug fixes, security updates, or feature enhancements are planned."
As I've mentioned in other posts, I'm a former Postmanaut who built it as a response to the lack of options for agents on the market.
I'm currently using Bruno (https://www.usebruno.com/)
Works well enough without getting in my way.
There are open source alternatives like Bruno (my favourite app ever).
And, if you need something advanced, just vibe-code it.
We replaced it with an in-house CLI, docs, and a password manager, all driven by Claude
At this point I do not see why the entirety of their software could not be a one shot prompt for the price of deer nuts.
Which, in case others didn't know, are under a buck.
Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.
Edit: mankind has gone for the better
I don't really think mankind or society has gotten better AT ALL in my lifetime. It turned into a short-term, rent-seeking, low-trust, shit society...
But I am open to hearing the experiences of others my age. Why do you feel so positive?
Do you even need it at all now? You can just ask the AI to write you a test suite in 5 minutes which calls all your endpoints with all the parameters and assertions you could possibly want. It's way more flexible than Postman and it's just a text file/script; you can share with any team member.
Just use bruno/insomnia if at all I need to run anything beyond curl
As agents start to write all the code, API platforms need to adapt to the new user. That means a complete rethink about how to approach API development.
It's why I'm building Sannr, an API platform built for coding agents.
When API calls go through our client, we capture it and turn it into API context that lives right next to the API code in the repo. Future coding agents have access to the API context and don't have to relearn API lessons again.
The API client is lightweight, lives on your machine, not in someone else's cloud.
Sannr is also open source, so you can see the code.