What does it mean to be self-contained? I think it suggests that you must consider carefully how you manage the protos and leverage shared definitions. But OpenAPI is more relaxed, and it is possible that your document is a description not a definition.

[rofrankel]

          What does it mean to be self-contained? I think it suggests that you must consider carefully how you manage the protos and leverage shared definitions. But OpenAPI is more relaxed, and it is possible that your document is a description not a definition. 

What if we refocused this AEP to describe how to use shared components across multiple APIs? Something like:

• When might you wish to share responsibility for describing or defining an API across multiple documents?
• What processes might you need to ensure that any upstream changes make their way to production, documentation, and other downstream artifacts?
• What special review processes may apply in these shared responsibility situations?

Originally posted by @earth2marsh in https://github.com/aep-dev/aep.dev/pull/134#discussion_r1527574323