Norbert Wójtowicz's four-step recipe for building APIs the way Pathom does, presented as 'too-few-steps-to-ignore': (1) make everything possible immutable by pushing side effects and IO to the edges; (2) use EDN wherever possible, replacing arbitrary strings/paths with EQL data structures; (3) use namespace-qualified keywords so every identifier is context-free; (4) once identifiers are context-free, flatten 1:1 joins into sibling attributes. Joins remain only for genuine 1:N relationships.