---
published: true
layout: post
title: Saying Things Are Broken is Broken
date: 2025-12-19T09:00:00.000Z
tags:
 - Semantic Versioning
 - Change
 - Breaking Changes
 - Vocabularies
image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/norman-rockwell-ruby-bridges-old-broken-piano-street.jpg
---
You read a lot of posts about "X" being broken. Especially in the age of AI smoke and mirrors. Everything that came before and in need of disruption is broken. In the API realm I exist within, OAuth is broken, OpenAPI is broken, and pretty much anything else that stands in the way of the artificial intelligence is broken. Saying something is broken is how you engage with people about the finer details of the world in way where you don’t actually have to engage with people about the finer details. “It is broken”, is a conversation ending cliche.

If you encounter someone who is wielding this statement about something you care about or thinks matters in today’s technology landscape, you are better off not engaging with them. They don’t want to engage in debate—they want to shut you down. We don’t fix broken things in this world, we create new things, and throw it away. If someone has dubbed something as broken they do not have any interest in fixing it. Hell, they don’t have any interest in actually understanding the thing before they claim it is broken-—they just want it gone.

Things like OAuth and OpenAPI aren’t broken. They literally have semantic versioning and working groups to iterate and evolve each version to adapt to the world around us. Semantic Versioning literally has a way of expressing a “breaking change”, acknowledging that breaking things are sometimes necessary to evolve. People who say that OAuth or OpenAPI are broken aren’t in the business of rolling up their sleeves and contributing to the specification conversation, they just want it out of the way so they can sell you whatever is next.