A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Find The Deprecated API Operations That Never Say When They Go Away," Kin Lane, November 12, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/12/find-the-deprecated-api-operations-that-never-say-when-they-go-away/
Marisol was a platform engineer at a freight-booking company, and she read the post on a Thursday with her lunch going cold. She had expected a tool announcement. What she got was a list of sixteen routes she half recognized.
Her team's sync job used some team membership calls, and she wasn't sure which ones. So she kept reading with a small knot in her stomach, looking for the word legacy in the paths.
The numbers were blunt. The post reported sixteen deprecated operations in the Teams slice of GitHub's REST description, and zero that announce a sunset. Her first reaction was defensive, and not on her own behalf. It seemed a little unfair to GitHub. The author admitted as much. Every one of those operations carries a notice saying the route is "closing down and will be removed from the Teams API," with a pointer to the replacement. Someone had clearly tried to tell people. Marisol had read notices like that for years and acted on exactly none of them.
That was the part that stung. The post said the notice "was written for people, not for machines," and she had been the person, repeatedly, and still had nothing scheduled. A paragraph of prose had never once put anything on her calendar. She noticed she was a little annoyed at the tool for making that so plain.
She also pushed back on it, in her head. The tool only reads what the description declares. The post says so itself: it doesn't call GitHub to see whether live responses send a Sunset header. So a zero was a statement about a document, not about the world. Maybe the headers were there at runtime. Maybe the real picture was kinder. She wasn't convinced the scoring was a fair verdict, and she thought the author knew that, given how plainly the limit was stated.
But the other half of the argument was harder to wave off. If the date isn't in the contract, her CI can't fail on it, her dependency report can't sort by it, and the agent her colleague was wiring up next month would see deprecated: true at best. She pictured that agent choosing a route because it looked like the shortest path. The post warned about exactly that.
Then she turned it around, which was the uncomfortable bit. Her own company published an OpenAPI description. It had deprecated operations, because everyone's does. She could not have said, with a straight face, how many of them told a consumer when they would go away. She suspected her team did the same thing GitHub did, a sentence in a description and a hope.
She did not open a discussion or draft a proposal. Nothing in the post asked for that. It asked for one call, and the call was free.
After lunch she exported her team's public API description, pasted it into the request body of the curl command from the post, and sent it to the deprecation endpoint. While it ran she opened a blank note and wrote two column headings: operation, date. She would fill in whatever the response said was missing, one row at a time, starting with the ones her own sync job touched.