It's always nice to read and know I am not an opinionated asshole, and other people share the misery. I admit I've been duped using OpenAPI. Generating the schema via FastAPI and Nest.js works pretty well. But like you we have been sorely disappointment by the codegen.

Anyone care to suggest alternatives though, assuming we want to call from node to python? I actually believe that having api packages with types is one of the only things startups should take from the enterprise world. I thought about GRPC, I had good experience with it as a developer, but the previous company had a team of people dedicated just to help with the tooling around GRPC and Protobufs.

So I picked OpenAPI, figuring simple is better, and plaintext over http is simpler. and currently I do believe it's better than nothing, but not by much. I am actually in the process of trying to write my own codegen and seeing how far I can get with it.

are protobuf's with GRPC really the way to go nowadays? should a startup of 20 developers just give up and document api in some shared knowledge base and that's it?