A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "We Did Not Skip Hypermedia, We Moved It Out Of The Response," Kin Lane, October 22, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/22/we-did-not-skip-hypermedia-we-moved-it-out-of-the-response/
Marisol read the post on a Thursday afternoon, between a failing build and a standup she was already late for. She builds integrations for a company that makes shipping software, and her first reaction to the title was irritation. It sounded like a clever way to say that nobody did the hard thing.
She read on, expecting to be let off the hook, and then she wasn't. The post sorted ways of consuming a spec into three kinds, and the first was hers: take the OpenAPI, push the button, ship an SDK. The author said the knowledge is frozen the day you compiled it. She thought of the client library her team regenerated twice a year, usually after something had already broken. She did not enjoy being described that accurately.
She did push back, at least in her own head. Calling the whole thing unbundling felt generous to her. Arazzo, Overlays, MCP and A2A were real documents that real teams had to write and keep current, and nobody was promising her they were the same as links in a response. A map is not a hypermedia control. The post seemed to know this, since it admitted the links object in OpenAPI describes hypermedia at design time and almost nobody fills it in. She wondered who in the industry had ever filled it in. She knew for certain it wasn't her.
The argument that got through was the shorter one. The author wrote that a person was never going to re-read your OpenAPI before every call, and an agent will. Her company had been talking about letting an agent handle order changes for customers. She pictured the agent reading a perfect map of the order service, finding a cancel operation, and calling it on a shipment that had already left the dock. The post described exactly that failure: an agent with a perfect map and no view of current state. The cost was in tokens, retries and wrong actions. She was surprised how concrete that made it. It wasn't a purity argument anymore.
The line she copied into her notes was "the cancel action is gone". It was the point where a response simply leaves the form out. Her service didn't do that. It returned the order with a status field and let the client work out the rest, and the client was frozen at build time.
She did not decide to rebuild anything. She was still not sure the unbundling story was more than a good frame, and she said as much to the empty room. But the recommendation was small enough to try: a next, a self, and the operations currently allowed on this resource.
So before standup she opened the OpenAPI file for the order service and searched for the links object on the order response. It was empty. She added one entry pointing from the order id to the operation that fetches it, committed it to a branch, and wrote a ticket for herself to sketch an allowed-actions field for shipped orders next week.