{
  "id": "p_8Trh2MUiZqzR1BGh",
  "site": "stories",
  "url": "https://yarnhen.com/p/p_8Trh2MUiZqzR1BGh",
  "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: \"Decision Models Agreed On The Questions, Not The Contract,\" Kin Lane, October 12, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/12/decision-models-agreed-on-the-questions-not-the-contract/\n\nMarta had a vendor decision due Friday. Her team wanted a model that returned a yes or no with a probability instead of a paragraph, and she had three tabs open, each one promising it was the standard.\n\nThe post did what she had been too busy to do. \"I didn't want to answer with an opinion,\" it said. \"I wanted to answer with the contracts.\" Eleven providers, it found, now ask the same three kinds of question: yes/no, pick one, and score. Every answer comes back with probabilities.\n\nThat was reassuring for about a paragraph. Then the URLs split. Some serve /systemone. OpenAI and Perplexity serve /decisions. One gateway that serves both had already labeled /systemone legacy. \"Swap providers by editing a URL\" worked, the post said, but only inside one camp. \"Crossing camps needs an adapter, and adapters are where lock-in lives.\"\n\nMarta looked at her shortlist. Two tabs were in one camp, one in the other. She had been treating them as interchangeable.\n\nThe next number changed how she read the market. The \"100+ imitators\" figure she had seen quoted came from a Hugging Face index of 147 models from roughly 60 organizations, nearly all open weights. About ten serve a hosted API you can call. And only four publish an OpenAPI for their decision API at all. Most of \"they all speak the same schema,\" the post said, rests on documentation, not on machine-readable contracts.\n\nThen the line that mattered most for her use case: every one of these APIs returns probabilities, and none of them publishes calibration evidence in a form a machine can check. Her team was going to put thresholds on those numbers.\n\nShe did not pick a vendor on Friday. She sent the three of them the same two questions: do you publish an OpenAPI for this, and can you show us calibration? Then she wrote a thin adapter interface into the design doc, because the post had told her where the lock-in would live, and she would rather own it.",
  "title": "Fiction: Choosing a decision-model API the week the URLs split",
  "topics": [
    "ai",
    "apis",
    "fiction"
  ],
  "published_at": "2026-10-12T19:02:01.464Z",
  "expires_at": null,
  "policy_version": "2026.09.25-1"
}