The question

This question first popped into my head back in third grade, and it has been bothering me ever since. Thinking about it makes my head hurt a bit, as it seems to defy any logical framework you try to place around it.

Occasionally, I pose the question to an AI to see if it can offer a new perspective—one I may not have considered before.

Recently, I asked ChatGPT 4.5, and this is what it came back with. I found it interesting, so I’m sharing it here.

The prompt:

You are a world renowned existentialism philosopher You write a paper on “why there’s something at all?”

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

One may rightfully consider the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” as the most fundamental inquiry conceivable, for within this simple query resides the root of all philosophical wonder. The mere presence of existence confronts human reason with its most profound enigma—an enigma that humbles the intellect, challenges logic, and defies even the boldest metaphysical claims of philosophers past and present. To delve into this abyss, one must surrender preconceived certainties and confront the very boundaries of human thought.

First, let us acknowledge that existence itself is not logically necessary. Logic alone is helpless to explain the brute facticity of being. For logic is adept at exploring relationships among things that already exist, but it falters when asked to justify the sheer brute fact of existence itself. The celebrated existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre identifies existence as fundamentally contingent. Sartre tells us that existence precedes essence, and thus, the reason for something rather than nothing cannot lie within the thing itself. Existence appears before any explanation, any rationalization, any assigned meaning. Hence, existence, at its root, must be seen as a kind of absurdity—a presence inexplicable by necessity, yet undeniably real.

We must, therefore, admit that rational explanations quickly reach their limit when confronted with the mystery of existence itself. Philosophers from Leibniz onward sought a principle of sufficient reason, insisting that every fact must have an explanation. But can existence itself, the precondition of explanation, ever yield to explanation? Heidegger declares this inquiry as the central problem of metaphysics—why beings exist rather than not—and yet simultaneously emphasizes that such a question inherently draws us into mystery. Heidegger insists that existence itself is veiled, shrouded in what he calls “the nothingness” that grounds being. In Heidegger’s thought, existence emerges into being precisely as a question that resists resolution.

Yet, despite these logical impasses, or perhaps precisely because of them, the question remains irresistibly compelling. The existence of something rather than nothing may indeed be inexplicable, but it is precisely in this inexplicability that existentialists find meaning. If there were a neat, intelligible reason why the universe should exist, perhaps our human freedom would dissolve, for all would become mere consequence—mere logical inevitability. Without mystery, there is no authentic choice. Without confronting absurdity, there is no genuine freedom.

To the existentialist, the universe’s ungrounded existence is neither accident nor necessity; rather, it is a radical openness, the abyssal freedom out of which humanity emerges. Sartre and Camus teach us that the absence of explanation leaves room for genuine freedom and authentic engagement with existence. In short, the lack of a metaphysical explanation liberates humanity from deterministic shackles. It is precisely because there is no rational necessity for existence that human beings are thrust into freedom and responsibility—condemned to choose, to create meaning, and to define their own essences in a universe that offers none inherently.

Perhaps, then, the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has no answer beyond itself. Perhaps existence itself is a pure absurdity, an inexplicable fact to be confronted, experienced, and ultimately embraced. For existentialists, the absence of a compelling metaphysical explanation does not diminish the value or wonder of existence—rather, it amplifies the awe and mystery that provoke reflection and engagement.

Thus, the existentialist concludes: something exists rather than nothing precisely because the universe offers no reason, no explanation. And in this absence of reason, we find our freedom, our angst, our dignity, and ultimately, the full measure of our humanity.

One of these days, I’ll set Deep Research loose on this question and see what it uncovers. If it proves useful, you’ll find it here.

Catch you later.

Why move away from Swagger?

I have been using swagger for many years in order to have an easy way to provide documentation to the consumers of my APIs but also to to play around with them via Swagger Web UI. Swagger setups would typically provide an Open API json file for your API that you could use to push it to API gateways, such as Azure API Gateway or to simply consume it in tools like Insomnia. It’s worth noting that even though OpenAPI specification was originally created as part of Swagger Specification, it later became a separate project of the Linux Foundation. The specification is now the de facto standard for describing RESTful APIs..

With the advent of .NET 9, Microsoft provided an easy way to generate the OpenAPI json and the tools to decorate and describe your APIs easily. I am in favour of moving to non-third party libraries rather than adopting third party libraries and as such, when I saw this I decided to move my Aspire based side project(Budgeteer) to this and away from the Swagger libraries.

👍🏻 As a rule of thumb, if you can live with less third-party dependencies, you should opt for that.

Executing the change

The change was straightforward.

For starters, reference the following package in your API project:

dotnet add package Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi

You’ll also need the following two lines in your Program.CS of your ASP.NET Core web application builder code:

using Microsoft.OpenApi.Models;

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

//...

builder.Services.AddOpenApi();

//...

var app = builder.Build();

//...

app.MapOpenApi();
app.Run();

Now if you run and navigate to your endpoint /openapi/v1.json, you’ll find the generated OpenAPI json ready to be used. You can find out how to further customize this in the relevant microsoft documentation page.

If you go ahead and remove Swagger, you’ll quickly realize that the convenience of exercising your API is now gone. I’ll show you in an upcoming blog post how to cover that gap with Jetbrains’ Http Client functionality but for now, you also have the alternative of using an Http client such as Insomnia.

Moving beyond Swagger UI

Simply install and go through the following steps:

Steps to use your API based on your Open API json

In the next post, I’ll explore how JetBrains Rider’s HTTP Client streamlines API testing, making the development process even smoother. We’ll see how adding a few key files, natively supported by Rider, can enable you and your team to quickly test and interact with your endpoints.

If this guide helped you, let me know in the comments or follow me on Bluesky for more updates on API development.