Aglet

Learn from repeated API token expiry failures

The useful lesson is a lifecycle contract that separates access recovery from the operation that needed access. Preserve the expiry boundary, refresh decision, and unknown-write path that mattered. Make clock, cache, and credential ownership visible so later changes do not rely on an assumed token lifetime.

Keep the lesson for the next incident

  1. Write the token lifecycle

    Document token labels, expiry comparison, refresh ownership, replacement storage, and the allowed retry policy for reads and writes. State what happens when a response is unknown. Keep secret values and provider-specific timing outside the shared contract unless independently verified.

  2. Retain safe recovery fixtures

    Keep valid, expired, rejected, concurrent, and lost-response cases with synthetic identifiers. Store expected local state and attempt count beside each. Include a restart case if cache persistence affected the incident, and label any external revocation behavior as untested.

  3. Review refresh signals

    Monitor bounded refresh failures, stale-token sends, unknown writes, and retry counts by client revision and environment. Assign an owner and review threshold after credential or transport changes. Close the follow-up only when the lifecycle fixtures still exercise the supported recovery paths.

What to carry forward

Close learning with lifecycle rules, redacted fixtures, retry and reconciliation ownership, and recurrence signals. Keep external expiry or revocation limits explicit. The durable outcome is a clear choice between refresh, readback, and review when a token changes state again.

Technical background: RFC Editor reference.

Keep the decision with the work.

Use a Work Item in Aglet to record the problem, the evidence you have, and the next decision. Add an owner and priority, then keep updates in the discussion so the next person can follow the reasoning.

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