We scanned 1,939 repositories. 95% of projects publishing an OpenAPI spec have no compatibility gate.
We went looking for projects that publish an OpenAPI specification and then let anything through CI unchecked. We expected a niche. We found the default. Of 85 repositories with a genuine first-party OpenAPI spec , exactly four run any breaking-change detection at all. That is 95.3% with no compatibility gate — and one of the four is oasdiff's own repository, so among projects that merely use…
Researchers examined 1,939 repositories to assess OpenAPI spec compatibility. Of those with a genuine first-party OpenAPI spec, only four had any breaking-change detection, indicating an absence of compatibility gates for 95.3% of projects. Further analysis revealed that 2,118 breaking changes occurred across the 60 repositories with usable release history, with 631 affecting consumers.
Remarkably, 12 out of the 18 repositories that shipped consumer-visible breaking changes disclosed them, revealing a 67% disclosure rate. Despite the initial headline suggesting a lack of tooling, fourteen releases shipped breaking changes without proper documentation. Researchers identified four errors in their methodology: version order inaccuracies, parallel maintenance line issues, direction of change, and the definition of "undocumented." These errors inflated the numbers and may have contributed to the misleading headline.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
