A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Who Actually Gets To Define API Standards," Kin Lane, October 28, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/28/who-actually-gets-to-define-api-standards/
Priya read the post at her desk after the platform team's standup, with a cold coffee and a half-finished migration ticket open in the other window. She is a platform engineer at a mid-sized logistics company. Her job is mostly making sure other people's services talk to each other without surprises.
The first section made her nod. Customers, the post says, show up as demand, and that matched her experience. Nobody on her team had ever been asked what an API standard should say. They had just inherited whatever won.
The section on investors made her wince. Her team had adopted a protocol last spring because three vendors had announced support in the same week. She remembered the meeting. No one had argued for it on its merits; it had simply felt unwise to be the one team not adopting it. The post's line about the agent space stuck with her: "Momentum gets mistaken for consensus." She wished she had a better answer than that for why her team chose what it chose.
She did not agree with all of it, though. The vendor section read to her as a little tidy. The post allows that most of the specifications it depends on exist because a company paid people to write them, but it still frames vendors as the group that wants a standard least pinned down. Her own experience was that the vendor engineers were often the ones who answered her questions, fixed her bug reports and wrote the migration guides. She wondered whether Kin Lane was underweighting how much unglamorous work gets done by people with a roadmap. She also noticed she was a little defensive, since her own company sells software, and she suspected that was part of it.
Then she hit the part about academics inside organizations, "disguised as architects". That one landed uncomfortably close. Two years ago she had written a long internal document on how her company should describe rate limits and plans across its services. It was careful, and she was proud of it. It sat in a wiki that perhaps eleven people had opened. Nobody outside the building had ever seen it, and she had never once thought that was a loss to anyone but her.
The ending asked her to show up. The post says most specification calls are public and recorded, and that the aim is to set the table so that "the people who live with a standard have as much say as the people who sell it." She did not feel ready to speak on a call. She had no opinions polished enough to defend to strangers.
But she could listen. She closed the migration ticket for the moment, opened the calendar for the specification group she cared about most, and found the next public meeting. She added it to her own calendar as an hour of attendance, camera off. In the description field she typed a single reminder to herself: bring the rate-limit document, and see whether anyone there is asking the same question.
Then she went back to the ticket.