[krisoft]

> Great, so now GitHub can't change the structure of their IDs without breaking this person's code.

And that is all the fault of the person who treated a documented opaque value as if it has some specific structure.

> The lesson is that if you're designing an API and want an ID to be opaque you have to literally encrypt it.

The lesson is that you should stop caring about breaking people’s code who go against the documentation this way. When it breaks you shrug. Their code was always buggy and it just happened to be working for them until then. You are not their dad. You are not responsible for their misfortune.

> I find it really demoralizing as an API designer that I have to treat my API's consumers as adversaries who will knowingly and intentionally ignore guidance in the documentation like this.

You don’t have to.

[vlovich123]

Sounds like you’ve maybe never actually run a service or API library at scale. There’s so many factors that go into a decision like that at a company that it’s never so simple. Is the person impacted influential? You’ve got a reputation hit if they negatively blog about how you screwed them after something was working for years. Is a customer who’s worth 10% of your annual revenue impacted? Bet your ass your management chain won’t let you do a breaking change / revert any you made by declaring an incident.

Even in OSS land, you risk alienating the community you’ve built if they’re meaningfully impact. You only do this if the impact is minimal or you don’t care about alienating anyone using your software.

[irjustin]

> Sounds like you’ve maybe never actually run a service or API library at scale.

What was the saying? When your scale is big enough, even your bugs have users.

[raincole]

Yeah, but when you are big enough you can afford to not care individual users.

VScode once broke a very popular extension that used a private API. Microsoft (righteously) didn't bother to ask if the private API had users.

[whatevaa]

VScode is free, so not really money on the line. Easy decision. Things get complicated when money gets involved.

[vlovich123]

If you think that just because VSCode is free there's no money on the line, you're not thinking about things the way others do. As I said, reputation alone definitely has a cost and Microsoft has partnerships where VSCode is strategic. They probably just made a calculation that there's not enough users and/or the users using that private API were strategically misaligned with their direction.

[halestock]

> The lesson is that you should stop caring about breaking people’s code who go against the documentation this way. When it breaks you shrug. Their code was always buggy and it just happened to be working for them until then. You are not their dad. You are not responsible for their misfortune.

Sure, but good luck running a business with that mindset.

[Kwpolska]

Apple is pretty successful.