Every API looks clean on launch day. The real test is what it looks like six months later, after three clients have integrated with it, a mobile app depends on it, and product wants to ship a feature that almost — but not quite — fits the existing shape of your endpoints.,At ekByteForge we've settled on a small set of rules that cost almost nothing up front and save a lot of pain later. None of this is novel; it's just easy to skip when you're moving fast.,Version from day one. Even a solo side project benefits from /v1/ in the URL. It costs you nothing today and saves you a painful migration the first time a breaking change is unavoidable.,Never remove a field — deprecate it. Add a deprecated flag to your internal docs, keep returning the old field alongside the new one, and give consumers a real deadline. Silent removals are how you find out an old mobile build is still in the wild the hard way.,Design the error shape before the happy path. A consistent { error: { code, message, details } } envelope across every endpoint means client code can handle failures generically instead of special-casing each route.,Make pagination boring and identical everywhere. Cursor-based, same query params, same response envelope, on every list endpoint — no exceptions for 'this one's different.',Write the docs as part of the PR, not after. If the description of an endpoint is hard to write, that's usually a sign the endpoint is trying to do too much.,None of this is exciting. That's the point — boring APIs are the ones nobody has to think about six months in.