The Twenty-Minute API Overhaul That Saved Our Sanity: Why Nested Routes Had To Die

The Critique That Launched a Thousand Un-Nests

In the relentless churn of software development, where complexity often masquerades as sophistication, the true value of an outsider’s perspective cannot be overstated. The software world frequently suffers from tunnel vision, where architectural decisions made months or years prior become immutable laws, even when they actively degrade the user experience. It takes a moment of brutal clarity—often delivered with the brevity of a tweet—to shatter these self-imposed constraints. @jasonfried shared on Feb 3, 2026 · 12:40 PM UTC an almost unbelievable anecdote illustrating this phenomenon: a critical piece of feedback that initiated a massive, sanity-saving overhaul in just twenty minutes.

The critique itself was beautifully, almost painfully, concise. It didn't require lengthy architectural documents or multi-day workshops. It was a direct instruction born of observation: "Stop nesting the routes!" This seemingly small directive pointed toward a foundational flaw in their API design, a classic case of optimizing for the database schema instead of the API consumer. When such focused feedback arrives, especially from a trusted agent, the correct engineering response is not defensiveness, but immediate inquiry and, if validated, swift remediation.

Why Nested Routes Were Killing Our Sanity

Deeply nested API routes are the digital equivalent of an overly complicated set of Russian nesting dolls—initially intriguing, quickly frustrating, and incredibly fragile. In this specific architecture, the problem manifested in paths that looked something like this: /users/{id}/projects/{proj_id}/tasks/{task_id}. While this structure might perfectly mirror the relational schema of the underlying database, it imposes an unnecessary burden on anyone trying to interact with those resources programmatically.

The Hidden Costs of Deep Nesting

The sheer depth of these paths introduces significant cognitive friction. Every interaction with a task required the consuming application to first know and explicitly provide the user ID and the project ID, even if the system already possessed session context or other means to deduce those relationships. This coupling forced developers into cumbersome multi-step authentication or context-passing mechanisms, ballooning request complexity far beyond what was necessary for a simple resource manipulation.

Furthermore, maintenance becomes a labyrinthine effort. Imagine versioning: if the relationship between users and projects changes, or if a new entity, say milestones, needs to be inserted between projects and tasks, the cascade of required URL modifications can be vast. Each modification risks breaking existing integrations built upon the assumption of that specific, deep hierarchy.

This complexity directly translates into Developer Cognitive Load. When the URL itself is a complex map of required context, developers spend less time solving the business problem and more time mentally mapping the required URI structure. It is a tax on every single API call, and one that silently erodes productivity over time.

The Core Principle: Favoring Flat, Resource-Centric Design

While the foundational tenets of Representational State Transfer (REST) encourage thinking in terms of resources, there is a frequent practical deviation where developers mistake relational modeling for required URL hierarchy. Pure REST argues for treating every resource as addressable, but it doesn't mandate that the address must encode the entire traversal path for secondary resources.

The elegant solution implemented was to flatten the hierarchy by introducing Explicit Resource Identifiers for all primary entities, regardless of perceived parentage. Instead of relying on path dependency, the structure shifted toward:

• /users/{id}
• /projects/{proj_id}
• /tasks/{task_id}

If a task needs to be associated with a specific project, the action becomes far cleaner, perhaps using query parameters or nested relationships within the request body for creation, but the endpoint remains simple: POST /tasks (with project ID provided contextually) or, more commonly in this simplified model, relying on system context. If filtering by project was still necessary for retrieval, it moved out of the path and into the query string: /tasks?project_id={proj_id}.

This approach dramatically enhances Discoverability. A new developer looking at the API documentation immediately sees the atomic resources available. They don't have to parse a path string to determine which IDs are mandatory prerequisites for accessing the endpoint they need. Simplicity in the address space implies simplicity in the mental model.

The Twenty-Minute Revolution: Implementation and Impact

The most astonishing element of this story is the speed of execution. This wasn't a major database migration or a massive application rewrite; it was a focused refactoring exercise targeting the routing layer.

Execution Strategy

The team's ability to execute this overhaul so rapidly suggests that the underlying code already treated these resources as distinct entities. The change likely involved updating the routing configuration files—the maps that translate incoming URLs to controller actions—and making minor adjustments within those controllers to accept resource IDs via query parameters or request bodies instead of relying on deep path segments. The core business logic for handling a task remained untouched, shielded by the thin layer of the router.

Immediate Gains

The immediate positive effects were palpable. Testing endpoints became trivial; mocking a request for /tasks/{task_id} required no knowledge of the originating user or project structure. Documentation immediately became cleaner, offering direct references to resources. This rapid simplification acted as an immediate productivity multiplier across the entire development ecosystem interacting with the API.

Lessons Learned: The Value of Ruthless Simplification

This swift correction serves as a powerful reminder that architectural elegance is often found not in the most complex mapping, but in the most direct path to the required data. The overhaul was directly linked to The Sanity Metric: the reduction of unnecessary mental overhead and the corresponding increase in development velocity and happiness.

The future API strategy, born from these twenty minutes, committed to a philosophy of ruthless simplification. Moving forward, the default stance would be decoupled, resource-centric endpoints, reserving path nesting only for scenarios where the relationship is absolutely required for authorization or strict contextual scope, and even then, with extreme caution. If you can achieve the same result with less cognitive strain, you must. This incident proved that the cost of maintaining overly complex routing far outweighed the perceived benefits of mirroring a deeply nested relational structure.

Source

• Original Post by @jasonfried: https://x.com/jasonfried/status/2018665873532506602