A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Setting the table: the second OpenLint office hours," Kin Lane, October 9, 2026, https://openlint.org/blog/2026/10/09/setting-the-table/
Marisol was a platform engineer, and she read the post on a Friday with a cold coffee next to her keyboard. Her team had a folder of linting rulesets that nobody wanted to touch. Every one of them ran in CI, and every one of them depended on a tool she did not control.
The post was from the second OpenLint office hours, held on 8 October. She skimmed the first paragraph looking for the catch. Its goal, the author wrote, was "getting OpenLint open for business". She had read sentences like that before, and they usually came before a pricing page. She kept going anyway, because the next clause said the aim was to run on par with Spectral so that people who depend on it can switch. That was her situation exactly, and it made her wary. Being told a switch is possible is not the same as being safe to make one.
The part she read twice was about compatibility. The post said backwards compatibility took most of the hour, and that everyone agreed every ruleset that works in Spectral today has to keep working. Then Jakub Rożek pushed further. Compatibility also had to cover the JavaScript API that editors embed, and the lint results themselves, the same messages and ranges from the same ruleset. Marisol thought about the editor plugins her colleagues had installed and how quickly they would complain if a squiggle moved by a line. Someone in that room had thought of it. She was glad, and a little annoyed that it had not occurred to her to ask.
Her discomfort came next. The post said the first version number was still undecided, and that measuring compatibility would need a conformance suite, a conversation still going in discussion #12. In plain terms, nobody could yet prove what everyone agreed on. She did not hold that against them. It was honest. But she could not take honest to her manager as a migration plan.
She also noticed a short line that she found oddly reassuring: "Telemetry is gone." She had not known to worry about it until she saw it listed as finished.
Then the last paragraph of the project section stopped her. The author was drafting a way to disclose AI use on issues and pull requests, and then wrote: "This post was drafted with Claude". Marisol sat back. Part of her admired the plain statement. Part of her disliked finding it at the bottom of something she had spent twenty minutes taking seriously. She decided the feeling was fair, and that it would not change whether the facts in the post were true or useful. She would still check them.
She did not sign up for anything, and she did not announce a migration. She opened the specification review at openlint/spec#2, which the post said documents the ruleset format as it works today without changing it. Then she picked the oldest, ugliest ruleset in her team's folder and began reading it against the spec, with a notes file open beside it. The post said the merge was a couple of weeks away. She wrote down every place the two disagreed, so she would have something concrete to say before then.