Why I Replaced Postman with a TypeScript Workflow in VSCode

Every time I work with an API, I go through two phases. First, I’m exploring — sending requests, checking responses, and figuring out how things actually behave. For years, this happened in Postman, or curl, or a scratch file hidden somewhere. Then later, when I need to make sure things keep working, I move to a test file and rewrite the same requests from scratch. By that point, I’ve already forgotten half of what I learned during the exploration phase. I kept doing this until I realized the problem wasn't laziness — it's that these two phases happen in completely different tools with completely different formats. The exploration work is always throwaway. That’s the gap I wanted to close. The problem with "UI-First" Exploration Yes, Postman already solves part of this. If all you want is to send a request and inspect the response, it works. But once the workflow gets more real, I want the thing I write during exploration to already be code: code in git, code I can review in a PR, code