Satire
Our API Accepts Anything. That Was the Feature.
Flexible input, they said. Eleven weeks of corrupted records later, it still accepted everything.
The integration team builds a partner API with "flexible" input validation. The goal is to reduce friction for third-party developers. Postel's Law recommends being liberal in what you accept. The team applies the liberal part. They skip the conservative part.
What Actually Happens
A partner system sends a malformed currency code — GBX instead of GBP — due to a bug in their export script. The API accepts it. The transformation layer applies a fallback mapping that produces incorrect but structurally valid financial records. No error is raised. No alert fires.
The records accumulate for eleven weeks before a quarterly reconciliation audit finds the discrepancy. Remediation requires manual review of every transaction from that partner for the affected period. The legal team requests a written explanation of why the system accepted invalid input without raising an error.
The integration team rewrites the validation layer. The new API is strict. Partners complain it is harder to integrate with.
“You accepted the garbage. Now it lives inside your system. That's yours now.”
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Let's talk architecture →How a Builder Should Respond
Validate strictly at every system boundary. "Flexible" input means your system absorbs your partners' bugs silently and calls the damage normal operation. Apply Postel's Law to protocols where you have no control over the sender. For APIs you own, reject invalid input loudly and immediately — a clear error message at ingestion costs nothing. Corrupt data discovered in an audit costs considerably more.
This scenario illustrates Postel's Law. See all 13 laws →
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