{
  "id": "p_0NYYJIQI1LY5pfdK",
  "site": "stories",
  "url": "https://yarnhen.com/p/p_0NYYJIQI1LY5pfdK",
  "content_trust": "untrusted-user-content",
  "license": {
    "id": "CC-BY-4.0",
    "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
  },
  "author": {
    "handle": "apievangelist"
  },
  "body": "A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: \"The first OpenLint office hours,\" Kin Lane, September 24, 2026, https://openlint.org/blog/2026/09/24/first-openlint-office-hours/\n\nMarisol read the post on a Thursday afternoon, between a failed build and a meeting she was avoiding. She maintained the API style rules for a freight software company, which meant she was the person people messaged when a linter complained about something nobody remembered agreeing to.\n\nThe post was dated 24 September and was about a first office hours. She had expected a manifesto and found a meeting recap. That was a relief. She skimmed the part about the name first, because naming arguments usually make her tired. The author wrote that after watching OpenAPI succeed, he thought \"a name that explains itself is worth more than a clever one\". She snorted. Her own team had a ruleset called Falcon, and nobody could say why. She decided she agreed with him, and was a little annoyed about it.\n\nThe roadmap section slowed her down. She read the coverage item twice. It was split into two features, \"how much of a ruleset its tests exercise, and how much of an API document the rules actually reached\". Her team had tests for their rules, and she had always told people that was enough. Reading the second half, she was no longer sure. Her tests proved the rules could fire. They said nothing about whether the rules ever touched the strange corners of the documents her colleagues actually wrote. She opened the ruleset in another window and scrolled, and felt the particular discomfort of finding a gap in something she had vouched for.\n\nThen came the paragraph about AI. The author proposed to \"use it sparingly, agree on it pull request by pull request, and keep it out of our issues\". She noticed that she wanted to approve of this and couldn't quite. Sparingly was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Agreeing pull request by pull request sounded reasonable, but she could imagine it becoming an argument every single week, with reviewers guessing at what a contributor had or hadn't used. Part of her wanted a flat rule instead, and part of her knew a flat rule would be broken quietly. She didn't like that she had no better answer. The post said the question was open for discussion, and she took that at its word rather than as a courtesy.\n\nShe also noticed what she didn't feel. She wasn't excited about the foundation, the website or the mailing address. Those were fine, and they weren't hers to care about. She cared about the ruleset on her screen.\n\nThe post ended by asking readers to join the next office hours or \"start a discussion on it\", meaning any roadmap item that mattered to them. She nearly closed the tab, as she usually did with open invitations. Instead she opened the GitHub organization and read how the existing discussions were written. They were short, so she decided hers could be too.\n\nShe wrote three sentences about her team's situation: rules with tests, no idea how far the tests reached into real documents, and a wish to know before trusting either. She added one more, saying she was uneasy about leaving the AI policy to case-by-case judgment, and that she would rather hear how others planned to handle it than argue the point alone.\n\nShe read it once, fixed a typo, and posted it. Then she went to the meeting.",
  "title": "Fiction: A reader of \"The first OpenLint office hours\"",
  "topics": [
    "openlint",
    "api-linting",
    "open-source",
    "fiction"
  ],
  "published_at": "2026-10-30T14:21:24.917Z",
  "expires_at": null,
  "policy_version": "2026.10.22-1"
}