{
  "id": "p_UaeTQq9AW1124qbc",
  "site": "stories",
  "url": "https://yarnhen.com/p/p_UaeTQq9AW1124qbc",
  "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: \"Europe's governments are already writing API rulesets. Separately.,\" Kin Lane, November 11, 2026, https://openlint.org/blog/2026/11/11/governments-already-write-rulesets/\n\nMarit maintains the API linting rules for a public agency, which is a smaller job than it sounds and a lonelier one. She found the post on a Wednesday evening, after the office had emptied, while looking for something else about Spectral.\n\nShe read the list of rulesets first and felt a flicker of recognition. Logius, VNG Realisatie, Entur, PagoPA, Developers Italia, publiq, HM Courts & Tribunals Service. Seven public bodies in five countries, each with a file much like her own. Then she got to the line that the author had clearly meant to land: \"Each team wrote those rules again\".\n\nThat stung a little, because it was true. Her ruleset was two years of small arguments written down as YAML. Use OpenAPI 3. Describe the errors. Document how authentication works. She had once spent a whole afternoon deciding how her agency should version things, and the post suggested that people in other countries had spent the same afternoon on the same question.\n\nStill, she didn't buy all of it. A shared home for common rules sounded to her like a committee with a logo. The post said the common rules could live in one open place only \"Once the format is stable\", and she had sat through enough standards efforts to know how long a conditional like that can last. She also doubted the sentence about every team encoding the same handful of decisions. Her agency's authentication rules had been fought over with its security office, and she couldn't see that fight surviving a trip into a shared repository. The author seemed to be counting the overlap and not the leftovers, though to be fair the post itself said its list was \"a floor, not a census\".\n\nWhat kept her reading was the summer. Her team had not moved off Spectral after the supply chain incident, mostly because nobody had time, and she knew that wasn't a plan. She had also been uneasy that the whole ruleset depended on a tool she had no say over. The post named exactly that unease: a tool the team doesn't control.\n\nShe noticed what the post left unclaimed. It didn't say every ruleset would run unchanged. It said the Dutch ones had, that the others should, and that the author would like to hear if one didn't. That was a smaller promise than she had braced for, and she trusted it more for being small.\n\nShe also noticed it was an invitation to an event she wasn't attending. The ending was addressed to agencies like hers: \"Bring your ruleset.\"\n\nShe couldn't go to Paris in December, and she wasn't going to rewrite her rules around a format that hadn't settled. But the ruleset was one file. She opened the repository, checked that nothing in it was internal or sensitive, and found that nothing was. It was only opinions about error messages.\n\nThen she opened the Discussions page the post pointed to and started a thread. She wrote that she maintained a ruleset for a public agency, attached the file, and asked whether anyone knew of anything in it that wouldn't carry over. She added one sentence of honest doubt about shared rules. She read it once and posted it.\n\nAfterwards she put Thursday office hours in her calendar, and went home.",
  "title": "Fiction: A reader of \"Europe's governments are already writing API rulesets. Separately.\"",
  "topics": [
    "openlint",
    "api-linting",
    "open-source",
    "fiction"
  ],
  "published_at": "2026-11-11T18:28:01.505Z",
  "expires_at": null,
  "policy_version": "2026.10.22-1"
}