// apis_automation

API Development & Workflow Automation

Backend APIs, integrations, webhooks, background jobs, and AI-assisted automation. Designed for retries, idempotency, and partial outages — because third parties fail on their schedule, not yours.

// what_we_build

What We Build

Backend APIs

Versioned, documented APIs with explicit contracts. Consumers get stable behavior; you keep room to change the internals.

Third-party integrations

Payment providers, CRMs, messaging — the systems your product depends on. Wrapped so their outages degrade your system instead of taking it down.

Webhook infrastructure

Receivers that verify signatures, dedupe retries, and replay safely. Senders that back off and dead-letter what keeps failing.

Background jobs & queues

Long-running work moved off the request path. Jobs are idempotent, observable, and safe to re-run — because they will be re-run.

AI-assisted automation

Agents and workflows that draft, classify, and route — with review gates before anything irreversible. Automation you can audit, not a black box.

// how_integrations_fail

How Integrations Fail

Integration code is where two systems’ assumptions collide. The happy path works on day one; these are the paths that surface later.

WEBHOOK_RETRY_DUPLICATION

The provider retries a delivery it thinks failed. The handler runs twice and creates a duplicate record — or a duplicate charge.

Counter: Every event carries an ID and the handler is idempotent. Processing is recorded before side effects run, so the retry becomes a no-op.

THIRD_PARTY_TIMEOUT_CASCADE

One slow vendor call holds a connection, then a worker pool, then the whole API. Your outage was their outage.

Counter: Every external call gets a timeout, a retry budget, and a circuit breaker. When the vendor is down, your system says so and keeps serving what it can.

SILENT_SYNC_DRIFT

Two systems sync nightly until one run half-fails. Nobody notices for six weeks, and the records disagree in ways no one can reconstruct.

Counter: Syncs are checksummed and reconciled. A failed run alerts on the first occurrence — not in week six.

AI_ACTING_ON_BAD_CONTEXT

An automation reads stale or wrong context and takes a confident, irreversible action on it.

Counter: Irreversible actions sit behind review gates: the AI drafts, a human or a hard rule approves. Every action is logged with the context it acted on.

// evidence

Evidence

lab_build

Webhook Relay

A webhook relay build: signature verification, idempotent processing, dead-letter queue.

view build→

field_note

Webhook Failure Modes

The ways webhook pipelines fail in production, and the defenses each one requires.

read note→

// faq

Questions

Do you build public APIs or internal ones?
Both. Public APIs get versioning, rate limiting, and documentation as first-class scope. Internal APIs get the same contract discipline with less ceremony.
How do you handle third-party outages and rate limits?
Timeouts, retry budgets with backoff, circuit breakers, and queues that absorb bursts. The design assumes every third party will be slow or down at some point — because it will be. Read the webhook failure notes →
What does API or integration work cost?
Most integration and automation builds land in the $5k-$25k range; full backend APIs with external consumers run higher. Small, well-defined integrations are the fastest engagements the lab takes. Scope is fixed in Discovery.
Can AI automation run safely on production data?
Yes, with boundaries. Read paths are scoped, irreversible actions require review gates, and every automated decision is logged with the context that produced it. If it cannot be audited, it does not ship.

Integrations fail on the third party’s schedule, not yours. Discovery maps the failure surface before anything gets wired together.

start --build