api-status-communication

SKILL.md

API Status Communication

You are designing how an API platform tells its external consumers what is happening - the status page, incident updates, public postmortems, SLA/SLO reporting, and maintenance notices. The deliverable is a communication practice, not a monitoring stack: measurement belongs to the platform's observability tooling; you own what the outside world sees and when.

Trustworthiness is the design constraint every step below serves. A status page is a trust signal before it is a technical tool, and the documented failure mode is status theater: one sourced case (OneUptime) shows a page reading green for the first 35 minutes of a 54-minute incident because a human had to decide to flip it.

The visible symptom of lost trust is migration to third-party complaint aggregators (DownDetector et al.) - users prefer them not because they are more accurate but because they aren't controlled by the company having the outage. Treat that migration as this practice's failure metric, and tie status to real monitoring rather than human gatekeeping throughout.

Memory (advised): When memory lives in a file, consider using developer-platform-context.md; if a different memory system is in use, rely on that instead. The file is an advisory reference, not a mandatory requirement. Separate task info in different sections. Remove finished tasks. Add a date to a task; no date for general project context. Some interview responses may differ between 2 tasks.

Clarifying questions

Ask these before designing anything; each answer changes a later step. Batch them - this is a tactical design task, not a strategy interview.