Five years on, curl is still the universal language of broken integrations

Curlese, Five Years Later

Five years after coining the term "curlese," the author confirms that sending curl commands remains the most effective way to debug HTTP integration failures. The social dynamics haven't changed—teams still blame each other—but the technical landscape has: HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are common, mTLS is routine, and WAFs and API gateways add new failure points. The post updates the survival kit with essential flags like `--resolve`, `--cert`, and `--fail-with-body`, and provides a refreshed dictionary of common curl errors. Notably, LLMs now also speak curlese, making curl output ideal for AI debugging.