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.
The command is the contract, the output is the verdict, and the ticket resolves itself.
- SpeckToTaste
Author here, thanks for posting this, I didn't expect to see traffic coming from HN.
I wrote the original "curlese" post (in Italian) back in 2021: the idea that when an HTTP integration breaks, a `curl -v` command is the only language every team should speak. Curl is the ideal tool since you don't have to share logs and neither prove your application behaviour. The thesis stood the test of time :-)
- rovr138
Curlese, five years later: curl is still the universal language of broken integrations