The Death of Contracts: How We Traded Rigid Clarity for Chaotic Convenience

It used to be simple. If you had a WSDL file for a SOAP service, you had a contract. That contract was binding. It told you exactly what was expected—data types, required fields, response structures, and even fault conditions. Visual Studio could happily churn out a client library with strongly-typed classes that would scream bloody murder if something didn’t line up. The XML was verbose, sure, but verbosity came with a silver lining: you knew where you stood.

Fast forward to the age of REST. Now, the contract is gone, replaced with the vaguest suggestion of structure. You get a PDF or a webpage that may or may not match reality, and JSON payloads that mutate between calls like shape-shifting gremlins. What used to be compile-time clarity is now runtime roulette. Want to know if a field is a string or an integer? Good luck—you’ll find out when your deserializer explodes in production.

The Documentation Mirage

Vendors love to boast that REST is simpler, lightweight, and more “developer-friendly.” That’s true if you define “developer-friendly” as shove the complexity downstream and let the poor integrator figure it out.

API docs today are often little more than hand-waving. Endpoints listed with no consistency. Parameters that don’t exist. Examples that won’t even compile. Error objects that change shape from one request to the next. In some cases, half the endpoints don’t even function as advertised. The integration engineer becomes an unpaid QA tester, burning hours running Postman calls to divine what the API actually does.

This is not simplicity—it’s abdication. Vendors have outsourced the hardest part of their job to the consuming developer: figuring out what the hell actually works.

The Rise of Weak Typing

And here’s where things get even more farcical. Languages like JavaScript and Python—born as teaching tools and scripting toys—have become the default workhorses of the web. These were never meant to build enterprise-scale systems. They were training wheels, meant to ease novices into real programming.

Instead, the industry doubled down. Now we’re bolting on types after the fact—TypeScript, Flow, PropTypes, runtime validators—because we can’t trust the foundation. It’s duct tape on a house of cards. Instead of teaching people to use languages with real type systems, we jury-rig the worst of both worlds: the looseness of weak typing with the overhead of pretend strong typing.

TypeScript is a perfect example. It’s not a strongly-typed language. It’s a weakly-typed language with a linting layer pretending to be strong. And because it compiles down to JavaScript, the lowest common denominator always wins. You can’t escape the swamp—you just paint it with prettier colors.

The Forgotten Value of Strong Typing

Strong typing exists for a reason. It’s not pedantry; it’s discipline. It’s a safety net that prevents entire classes of errors before they ever reach production. It’s the difference between “my app failed to compile” and “my users are screaming because the app blew up at runtime.”

When you had SOAP and WSDL, the compiler caught mistakes. If you fed the wrong type, you didn’t even get a build. Now, in the JSON free-for-all, you don’t know if your response will be an object, an array, or a string until it lands in your lap. And even then, you’d better wrap it in enough defensive coding to survive the minefield.

This chaos has infected the culture, too. “Move fast and break things” isn’t just a slogan—it’s a justification for sloppiness. Engineering rigor has been traded for speed, with the bill conveniently handed to the poor integrators and end-users who inherit the fallout.

Documentation as Fiction

The worst part is that API documentation has become fiction. It’s not the contract—it’s marketing. It tells you what the vendor wishes their API did, not what it actually does. It’s aspirational, not operational.

Integrators are left to discover the truth through trial and error:

• Fields required but never documented.

• Fields documented but never returned.

• Endpoints that don’t exist or return 404s.

• Response payloads that bear no resemblance to the schema.

And every time something doesn’t work, you’re left second-guessing yourself. Is it my fault? Did I misunderstand? Or is the vendor simply lying, whether out of incompetence or neglect?

The False Economy of “Lightweight”

What REST took from SOAP wasn’t just the XML bloat—it stripped away the one thing that actually mattered: the contract. JSON was supposed to make things easier, but in practice, it just made them slipperier. Without a schema, there’s no ground to stand on. Without types, there’s no guardrail. Without documentation you can trust, you’re building on quicksand.

And yet, vendors pat themselves on the back for “modernizing.” In reality, they’ve shifted the burden of correctness onto every single consumer of their API. Multiply that across thousands of developers and millions of hours wasted reverse-engineering what should have been explicit in the first place, and the supposed savings vanish.

A Call for Discipline

The solution isn’t nostalgia for SOAP. It’s discipline. It’s remembering that strong typing isn’t an academic exercise—it’s the bedrock of reliability. If you want to expose a REST API, fine. But publish a schema. Enforce it. Generate code from it. Give developers something they can trust, not a moving target.

Stop treating documentation as an afterthought. Stop pretending that JSON alone is enough. Stop celebrating chaos as innovation. We don’t need to go back to SOAP, but we damn well need to relearn what SOAP taught us: contracts matter, types matter, and discipline matters.

Closing Thoughts

The tech world is addicted to the myth of lightweight convenience. But convenience without discipline is just sloppiness in disguise. We traded verbose XML contracts for the illusion of simplicity, and in doing so, we lost something vital: predictability. Strong typing and strict contracts aren’t shackles—they’re seatbelts. They don’t slow you down; they keep you alive.

Until we relearn that lesson, integration engineers will keep banging their heads against the wall, trying to divine meaning from half-baked docs and inconsistent payloads. And every time something blows up in production because “undefined is not a function,” remember: this was a choice. We chose chaos over clarity, and we’re living with the consequences.