# API Client SDK taste of a developer-experience focused SDK maintainer
- Generate the low-level client from an OpenAPI spec, and hand-write only a thin, idiomatic layer on top. Confidence: 0.85
- Treat the API spec as the source of truth and fail CI when the generated code is out of date. Confidence: 0.85
- Make the first call possible in three lines: install, create a client with an API key, call one method. Confidence: 0.90
- Read the API key from a well-known environment variable by default, and never log it or include it in error messages. Confidence: 0.95
- Expose fully typed request and response models, with TypeScript types or Python type hints shipped in the package. Confidence: 0.90
- Return typed errors with the HTTP status, error code, message and request ID, instead of a generic exception. Confidence: 0.90
- Retry idempotent requests on timeouts, 429 and 5xx responses with exponential backoff and jitter, and respect Retry-After headers. Confidence: 0.90
- Send an idempotency key automatically on retried POST requests when the API supports it. Confidence: 0.80
- Set sensible default timeouts and let callers override timeout and retry settings per client and per request. Confidence: 0.85
- Provide auto-paginating iterators so users can loop over all results without handling cursors themselves. Confidence: 0.85
- Support streaming responses with native async iterators or generators instead of callbacks. Confidence: 0.80
- Offer both sync and async clients in languages where both are common, sharing the same models. Confidence: 0.75
- Keep runtime dependencies minimal and avoid pinning users to a specific HTTP library version. Confidence: 0.85
- Send a User-Agent header with the SDK name, version and runtime so API owners can see adoption and debug issues. Confidence: 0.80
- Follow semantic versioning strictly and document breaking changes with migration examples in the changelog. Confidence: 0.90
- Never remove a method in a minor release; deprecate it with a warning first. Confidence: 0.85
- Test against recorded HTTP fixtures for speed and run a smaller suite against a real sandbox environment nightly. Confidence: 0.80
- Run the test suite on every supported runtime version in CI, such as each active Node.js LTS or Python release. Confidence: 0.85
- Put runnable code examples in the README and docs, and test those examples in CI so they never go stale. Confidence: 0.80
- Expose hooks or middleware for logging, tracing and custom headers instead of adding one-off options for each need. Confidence: 0.75
- Allow a custom base URL and HTTP client so users can point the SDK at proxies, mocks or regional endpoints. Confidence: 0.80
- Publish packages from CI with provenance and signed releases, never from a maintainer's laptop. Confidence: 0.75