Optic Is Dead — Alternatives for OpenAPI Breaking Change Detection

If you've been using Optic to catch breaking changes in your OpenAPI specs, you've probably noticed: the repository was archived on January 12, 2026. The last issue, titled "No Longer Maintained," was opened four days before that. The final release (v10.3.0) shipped, and that was it. Optic was a good tool. It was YC-backed, had 1,500+ stars, and companies like Snyk used it in production. But it required a CLI setup, a config file, CI pipeline integration, and custom rulesets written in TypeScript. For many teams, that setup cost meant the tool never made it past the "we should try this" stage. So what now? The problem hasn't gone away Breaking API changes still ship to production every day. A field gets renamed, an endpoint gets removed, a required parameter becomes optional — and downstream services break silently. If you've ever debugged a 500 error that turned out to be someone else's schema change slipping through code review, you know the pain. The need for automated breaking chan