A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Trust You Can Carry Has To Be Written Down," Kin Lane, October 22, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/22/trust-you-can-carry-has-to-be-written-down/
Priya was three weeks into a migration plan when a colleague forwarded her the post. She runs platform engineering at a company that sells scheduling software, and her plan was tidy. Containers, replicated databases, infrastructure as code, all checked off. She read the post on the train, expecting a pitch about leaving the cloud, and found it was about something else.
The first thing that stung was the claim that portability is usually understood as moving workloads, and that this is only one layer. She had been proud of that plan. She read on with her jaw set.
Then came the part about where authority lives. The post says some of it is in application code, some is implied by a scope, some lives in a gateway or the identity provider or the user interface, and a lot of it lives in the heads of the people who built the system. She put her phone down on her knee. She was one of those heads. Nobody else could say why one service accepted a token that another would reject, and she had never written it down because she had never needed to.
She picked the phone back up and found the line she kept rereading: "Before trust can become portable, it must first be visible." She wanted to argue with it. Visible to whom? Writing things down is easy to recommend and expensive to do, and she had a deadline. She also wasn't sure a pile of published documents amounts to trust. The author seemed to concede as much near the end, saying the checks only show whether an authority model exists outside one platform, not whether it is right. She found that honest, and it irritated her anyway, because it meant the work couldn't be finished by satisfying a checklist.
The numbers were harder to wave off. Across roughly 28,900 providers, about a third publish machine-readable auth of any kind, and a quarter hand out a static bearer secret that names nobody. She knew where her own company would land. Two of her internal services still used a shared secret, and she knew exactly which two.
The sentence she copied into her notes was about the generic admin role: "all that really means is that excessive authority can travel with you." That was her fallback plan for the awkward cases. Give the new environment broad roles now and tighten them later. She had said it in a meeting only last week.
By the time her stop came she hadn't changed the plan, and she didn't pretend to herself that she had. She didn't believe one blog post justified delaying a migration. But she didn't want to be the person who moved everything except the meaning of it.
At her desk she opened a blank file and typed the name of every OAuth scope her system issued, one per line. Next to the first three she wrote a single sentence saying which business action each one permits. She got stuck on the fourth. That was all she did, and she left the file open for the morning.