Show me the incentive and I can likely guess how hard your API is to use.

This is strangest read I had in a while. It is like saying that operating a submarine is very counter intuitive, I know how to operate an airliner, both are vehicles.

In all honesty this is how a typical developer experience has been for a long time in a number of systems. Expecting someone to pre-chew your programming food is silly.

> You probably already know this, but apparently the first line in the file, that comment, is actually significant.

I did not knew this.

For me the worst APIs by far are on Android. They are even worse than win32.

I'm really sorry, but when someone posts an entire article that they don't first proof-read at least once, it makes me question the rest of what I'm reading and can't continue.

> ... I found mysekf launching TextEdit just to do that

I hope everyone else enjoys it!

All of this is written with a sense of anger and sarcastic invective that doesn't seem appropriate. This is part of learning any new language or API. Going in with an attitude of "I should already know how all this works, why am I forced to do research or look at docs?" seems unfair and will spoil the experience of learning anything.

> Why was that so hard? Why are the models here separate from the ones in the right click menu? Too many questions.

The very screenshot above this paragraph actually answers this, in what admittedly might be an uncharacteristically clear UI: "Siri and Safari will always run translations online."

One thing you could consider doing, is using Claude in chrome extension and having it help you read through the api docs with you and gather sort of cheatsheet, it's helped me immensely, it can click through and parse pages etc.

The "finally got it working then realized Spotlight already does this" moment is brutal.

API design isn't just about functionality. it is about discoverability and if your right-click menu uses different models than your API and your error messages don't explain why, you are just creating friction for no reason.

Sometimes the "proper" solution isn't worth the super complicated maze.