In my experience people read the JSON output of things more often than anything else in both …

In my experience people read the JSON output of things more often than anything else in both development and in maintenance. You can certainly make a point about that being stupid, and it certainly also is stupid. It just seems to be what happens when you have a gazillion APIs and even more business processes and a lot of people who should know what they are doing, who don’t. I recently had the joy of reverse engineering a terrible piece of JavaScript which created a vast and ridiculously complicated JSON delivery for one of our most important frontends. It was so full of any assumptions that the original author had several functions which were still doing various things with “unknown” because the data which had once been there wasn’t. Anyway, since I had to reverse engineer it from terrible code and no documentation I figured I’d just talk with the people who worked the data inputs and outputs and maybe learn something about the process from their business processes. …