I would not say this is not idiomatic - it depends on the situation. On production code or scripts where I want to be sure (which is the case mostly), I would

I would not say this is not idiomatic - it depends on the situation. On production code or scripts where I want to be sure (which is the case mostly), I would indeed use something like: %{status: 200, body: json} = Req.get!(".....") And then later restructure as needed. Sometimes it would be: meta = json |> Map.fetch!("meta") |> Map.fetch!("description") Or pattern matching as you did!