Some of the fault for this lies with client libraries. Many, including popular ones[1], either don't provide a way to get the body of error responses at all, or

Some of the fault for this lies with client libraries. Many, including popular ones[1], either don't provide a way to get the body of error responses at all, or make it particularly cumbersome to do so. For example, success bodies might be parsed automatically by registering the right parser for the content type, but to parse an error response you need to manually instantiate a parser and deserialise the body. Until error responses are first-class objects in client http libraries, devs will continue being lazy. [1] Not to pick on retrofit -- it is generally awesome -- but http://square.github.io/retrofit/2.x/retrofit/retrofit2/Response.html http://square.github.io/retrofit/2.x/retrofit/retrofit2/Resp...