Experience Rulesets

Uniform shapes, conventions, and structure so every endpoint behaves predictably.

Descriptions, summaries, examples, and references that make the API self-explanatory.

Defensive contracts — status codes, error shapes, and required fields that hold up in production.

Well-formed schemas, types, and constraints for clean, validatable data.

Metadata, indexing, and links that help humans and machines find the API.

Policy, ownership, and lifecycle signals that keep an API portfolio accountable.

Developer-experience details that make the API easy to learn and consume.

Casing, vocabulary, and naming conventions applied consistently across the surface.

Authentication, authorization, and the OWASP API Security Top 10 as machine checks.

Execution contracts for AI agents — scope, audience, consequence, short-lived tokens, and human-in-the-loop escalation checked in the API description.

Standardized, informative error responses across every operation.

Caching, payload, and efficiency signals that keep the API fast.

Explicit, predictable versioning so changes don't break consumers.

Consistent paging of collection responses.

Tracing, correlation, and logging hooks for operating the API.