Manual vs Generated OAuth Scopes: Lessons Learned While Building an Identity Platform

Short summary

The article compares manual vs generated OAuth scope management based on experience building an identity platform. Manual scopes are simple and flexible but become unmaintainable as APIs, clients, and permissions grow — leading to orphaned scopes, inconsistent naming, and configuration drift. Generated scopes derive from an authorization model (resources + permissions), providing a single source of truth and automatic synchronization, at the cost of reduced flexibility and migration complexity.

• •Manual OAuth scopes are simple but become unmaintainable at enterprise scale with orphaned scopes and naming drift
• •Generated scopes derive from an authorization model, providing a single source of truth and automatic cleanup
• •Trade-offs: generated scopes reduce flexibility, complicate the model, and make migration from manual systems challenging

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.