>I had these same issues. It took me considerably more time and effort to write a Swagger spec and get the UI to actually behave than it did to write my entire API and some simple docs in markdown.
It's definitely going to be faster to just write it at first. Swagger, and everything like it, is an investment.
>I also tried out the "codegen" and a few other projects that generate boilerplate from a spec (for Python) - the code it generated was frustrating, lengthy, and much more complex than the simple endpoints that I quickly wrote from scratch.
That's auto-generated code for you. Can't rival humans (yet), but that doesn't automatically mean it's not useful.
Compare hand-rolled ASM with compiler-rolled ASM for an example. Human-written ASM will often be much more compact and readable, sometimes even more performant, but then you have to write ASM instead of letting the compiler do it for you.
It's definitely going to be faster to just write it at first. Swagger, and everything like it, is an investment.
>I also tried out the "codegen" and a few other projects that generate boilerplate from a spec (for Python) - the code it generated was frustrating, lengthy, and much more complex than the simple endpoints that I quickly wrote from scratch.
That's auto-generated code for you. Can't rival humans (yet), but that doesn't automatically mean it's not useful.
Compare hand-rolled ASM with compiler-rolled ASM for an example. Human-written ASM will often be much more compact and readable, sometimes even more performant, but then you have to write ASM instead of letting the compiler do it for you.