标签：#api

Today I launched Beach Day API , a developer API for real-time beach, ocean, water quality, advisory, amenity, access, and condition data. The goal is simple: make it easier for developers to build apps and tools around beach conditions without having to manually gather data from scattered sources. Beach Day API currently supports beaches across the United States and Australia , and returns structured JSON that can be used in travel apps, weather apps, surf tools, tourism websites, hotel and resort platforms, map-based search experiences, local discovery apps, and coastal safety dashboards. What the API includes Beach Day API can provide data such as: Beach profiles GPS and location data Ocean and weather conditions Water quality grades Advisories and closures Amenities Access details Beach-specific safety and visitor information A proprietary Beach Day Score The Beach Day Score is designed to give developers a fast way to surface whether a beach looks like a good choice for visitors on a given day. Why I built it Most weather APIs are broad. They can tell you temperature, wind, rain, or general conditions, but they usually do not answer the real user question: “Is this a good beach day?” That question depends on more than weather. It can involve water quality, advisories, closures, ocean conditions, amenities, beach access, and the actual visitor experience. Beach Day API is built around that more specific use case. Example use cases Some things developers could build with it: A beach finder app A surf or coastal conditions app A hotel or resort beach conditions widget A local tourism guide A travel planning tool A map-based beach discovery experience A safety dashboard for advisories and closures A recommendation engine for nearby beaches Built for simple integration The API uses API-key authentication and returns clean JSON responses. I wanted it to be straightforward enough that a developer could start testing quickly and then build it into a real product withou

Hey Dev Community, If you are running enterprise-scale web scrapers, pricing monitors, or data ingestion pipelines for LLMs, you’ve probably spent sleepless nights dealing with network latency and sudden 403 blocks. When choosing an infrastructure partner, every provider pitches the same script: "99.9% uptime guarantees, millions of residential IPs, and lightning-fast response times." But in the trenches of real-world data collection, we all know that marketing numbers rarely match production reality. Last quarter, my team ran an exhaustive infrastructure audit to compare proxy providers pricing performance and infrastructure stability. If you want to dive straight into our live dataset, telemetry scripts, and interactive monitoring utilities, you can check out the full workbench at ProxyVero . Here is a technical breakdown of how we built our benchmarking matrix, and the architectural gaps we discovered across mainstream enterprise proxy services. 📊 1. The Core Metrics: Uptime vs. Success Rates The biggest lie in the networking industry is confusing Server Uptime with Request Success Rate . A proxy gateway server can maintain a 99.9% uptime while the underlying residential peer network is failing 20% of your data collection requests due to strict target WAFs or high peer churn. When conducting our proxy providers uptime guarantees performance benchmarks , we evaluated three core parameters: TCP Handshake Latency : The time it takes to establish a connection with the proxy endpoint. TTFB (Time to First Byte) : Critical for parsing dynamic JavaScript targets. HTTP Status Code Reliability : Tracking the exact ratio of 200 OK vs. 403 Forbidden / 429 Too Many Requests . ⚖️ 2. The Big Three: Oxylabs vs Bright Data vs SmartProxy Comparison To provide an objective proxy network performance benchmarks comparison , we deployed standard headless browser worker instances (Playwright/Puppeteer) routed through different enterprise gateways. Below is a high-level summary of our a

Open Graph images are the single biggest factor in whether your shared links look credible or broken. Yet most sites ship one generic image on every page because making a unique one by hand is tedious. Here is a more sustainable approach: treat preview images as generated data, not hand-made design. The problem, concretely When you share a link, the receiving platform reads your page's og:image meta tag and renders a card. If that tag is missing, points to a low-res logo, or is the same image on all 200 pages, your links look generic in every feed, Slack channel, and group chat. Studies of social sharing consistently show that posts with a clear, relevant preview image get meaningfully more engagement than those without. The reason teams skip it is not ignorance. It is friction. Opening a design tool, duplicating a template, swapping the title text, exporting at the right dimensions, and uploading the file takes 10 to 20 minutes per page. Nobody keeps that up across a real publishing schedule. So the back catalog stays bare and new posts get whatever the default is. The insight: it is template work Look at a typical preview card and ask what actually changes between pages. Usually just the title, maybe the author and a category tag. The layout, background, logo, and fonts are constant. That is the textbook definition of a job you should template once and generate programmatically, not redo by hand each time. How to solve it The cleanest pattern is to generate the image at build time or on first request, then cache it. Conceptually: // During your build or in an API route async function getOgImage ( post ) { const params = new URLSearchParams ({ title : post . title , author : post . author , tag : post . category , }); // Returns a ready Open Graph image URL return `https://getcardforge.dev/api/card? ${ params } ` ; } // In your page head // <meta property="og:image" content={getOgImage(post)} /> You can build this yourself with a headless browser plus an HTML templ

Why API Breaking Changes Still Reach Production Even With CI/CD A few years ago I watched a "tiny" API change take down checkout for about forty minutes. The change was a one-liner. The pull request had two approvals. CI was green across the board. And it still broke production, because the thing that actually mattered was never tested. If you run microservices at any real scale, you have lived some version of this. Let's talk about why it keeps happening even with a mature pipeline, and what the teams who don't keep getting paged do differently. The Problem Here's the change that caused the outage. A payments service had a response that looked like this: { "status" : "ok" , "transaction_id" : "txn_8842" , "amount_cents" : 4200 } Someone renamed amount_cents to amount and switched it to a decimal, because "cents is confusing." Cleaner field, better docs. The producing service's tests were updated to match, everything passed, it shipped. The problem: three downstream services still read amount_cents . One of them was the order service, which now received undefined , multiplied it by a quantity, and wrote NaN into the database. The failures didn't even surface in the payments service. They surfaced two hops away, in a service the original author had never opened. This is the core issue. A breaking change is not defined by the service that makes it. It's defined by the consumers who depend on it. And the producer's CI pipeline has no idea those consumers exist. Why Existing Approaches Fail The natural reaction is "we need more tests." But look at what each layer actually checks. Unit tests verify the code does what the author intended. The author intended to rename the field. The unit tests were updated to expect amount . They passed because they were testing the new, broken behavior. Green unit tests told us nothing. Integration tests verify the service works with its own dependencies — its database, its cache, the APIs it calls. They almost never spin up the services

If you've ever tried to pull live options data into a Python script, you've probably hit the same wall I did: the cheapest real-time providers start at $99/mo. Here's how to do it for $20/mo — or free if you stay within 1,000 credits/day. What You'll Need Python 3.8+ requests library ( pip install requests ) An API key from market-option.com (free tier available, no card required) Fetching a Full Options Chain import os import requests API_KEY = os . environ [ " MARKET_OPTIONS_KEY " ] BASE_URL = " https://market-option.com/api/v1 " def get_chain ( ticker : str ) -> list [ dict ]: res = requests . get ( f " { BASE_URL } /options/chain/ { ticker } " , params = { " apiKey " : API_KEY }, ) res . raise_for_status () return res . json ()[ " results " ] contracts = get_chain ( " SPY " ) print ( f " { len ( contracts ) } contracts returned " ) print ( contracts [ 0 ]) Each contract in results looks like this: { "details" : { "contract_type" : "call" , "strike_price" : 530 , "expiration_date" : "2026-01-17" , "ticker" : "O:SPY260117C00530000" }, "last_quote" : { "bid" : 3.45 , "ask" : 3.50 , "midpoint" : 3.475 }, "greeks" : { "delta" : 0.42 , "gamma" : 0.031 , "theta" : -0.18 , "vega" : 0.29 }, "implied_volatility" : 0.182 , "open_interest" : 12418 } Filtering by Expiration and Strike def get_near_the_money ( ticker : str , expiration : str , spot : float , width : float = 0.05 ): """ Return contracts within ±width% of spot price. """ contracts = get_chain ( ticker ) low = spot * ( 1 - width ) high = spot * ( 1 + width ) return [ c for c in contracts if c [ " details " ][ " expiration_date " ] == expiration and low <= c [ " details " ][ " strike_price " ] <= high ] atm = get_near_the_money ( " SPY " , " 2026-01-17 " , spot = 530 ) for c in atm : print ( c [ " details " ][ " strike_price " ], c [ " details " ][ " contract_type " ], c [ " last_quote " ][ " bid " ], c [ " greeks " ][ " delta " ], ) Scanning for High IV Contracts def high_iv_scan ( ticker : str , iv_threshold :

Synchronous billing is easy, and that's the problem — it makes you think all billing is easy. When a request does its work inline, the billable number is in the response by the time you send it. The gateway meters from there — the meter write, retries and all, is its problem, not yours. From your side, synchronous billing is one number in the response. Asynchronous work breaks that. The request submits a job; the work happens later, in a worker; the result comes back through a poll or a callback. And the thing you bill for — characters processed, pages converted — isn't known when the request arrives. It's known when the job finishes . So you can't meter at the edge. The meter has to fire from the completion path. And the real difficulty is firing it exactly once per unit of completed work — because requests, polls, and retries all conspire to make that zero times or many times. This is platform-agnostic. Every submit-process-poll API has it. I'll use the system I run as the example, but the shape is the same anywhere. Three ways metering goes wrong On arrival. Carry the synchronous habit over and you meter when the job is submitted. But you don't know the size yet, so you're forced into a crude flat fee — or you bill for work that hasn't happened and might fail. Wrong unit, wrong time. On retrieval. The subtle one. You wire the meter to fire when the client fetches the result. Now a client who submits a job, lets it run — costing you real money downstream — and never bothers to poll is never billed. You did the work for free. "Completion" is not "the client picked up the result." It's the worker finishing. Without a fixed quantity. Input characters or output characters? Pages before OCR or after? If you haven't decided exactly what you measure and where, invoices drift and customers argue. Decide once; measure there. All three point the same way: meter on measured work-completion, with a fixed definition of the unit. Not on arrival. Not on retrieval. The mechanism:

Every quarterly earnings number for every US public company going back to 2009 is sitting in a free, well-documented JSON API run by the US government. No API key. No rate limit for normal use. No paywall. Almost nobody in the dev community seems to know it exists. It's at data.sec.gov , and it's the same data Bloomberg charges $24k/year for. What's in it The SEC requires all US-listed companies to file financial reports in XBRL — a structured XML format where every number is tagged with a standardised concept name. The EDGAR system has been collecting these since around 2009. The companyfacts endpoint exposes all of it as clean JSON: GET https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyfacts/CIK{cik}.json Where CIK is the company's SEC identifier (10 digits, zero-padded). For Apple, that's 0000320193 . The response is a large JSON object with every concept the company has ever reported, broken down by period. The other endpoint you need is the ticker-to-CIK map: GET https://www.sec.gov/files/company_tickers.json This gives you a flat list of all US-listed companies with their CIK, ticker, and name. Load it once and cache it. One gotcha: concept names vary by company Companies don't all use the same GAAP concept names to report the same thing. Apple reports revenue as RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax . Older companies use Revenues . Some use SalesRevenueNet . If you just look up one concept name, you'll get blanks for most companies. The fix is a concept alias map: try each name in order, use the first one that has data. const CONCEPT_MAP : Record < string , string [] > = { revenue : [ ' Revenues ' , ' RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax ' , ' RevenueFromContractWithCustomerIncludingAssessedTax ' , ' SalesRevenueNet ' , ' SalesRevenueGoodsNet ' , ], netIncome : [ ' NetIncomeLoss ' , ' NetIncomeLossAvailableToCommonStockholdersBasic ' , ' ProfitLoss ' , ], operatingCashFlow : [ ' NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities ' , ' NetCashProvidedB

The Complete Guide to OpenAI-Compatible APIs for Chinese LLMs One of the smartest decisions OpenAI made was making their API the de facto standard for LLM interaction. The openai Python package, the ChatCompletion interface, and the message format have become the HTTP of AI — nearly every major model provider now supports some form of OpenAI compatibility. This means you can swap models without changing your code. Here's how to use that to access China's best LLMs. The OpenAI SDK Pattern If you've used OpenAI's API, you already know the pattern: from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI ( api_key = " sk-... " ) response = client . chat . completions . create ( model = " gpt-4o " , messages = [{ " role " : " user " , " content " : " Hello! " }] ) To access Chinese models through an OpenAI-compatible gateway, you change exactly two things : client = OpenAI ( base_url = " https://api.tokenmaster.com/v1 " , # ← Changed api_key = " tm-... " # ← Changed ) Everything else stays the same. The same SDK, the same method calls, the same message format. What This Unlocks By switching to an OpenAI-compatible gateway for Chinese models, you gain access to: Model Family Top Models Competitive Advantage OpenAI-Compatible DeepSeek V4-Pro, V4 Flash, Coder Coding, math, reasoning ✅ Qwen (Alibaba) 3.7-Max, 3.5-Flash Long context (256K), multilingual ✅ GLM (ZhipuAI) 4.5, 4-Flash Reasoning, structured output ✅ Baichuan Baichuan 4 Chinese content generation ✅ All accessible through the same SDK, the same API key, the same base URL. Migration Guide Step 1: Get Your Gateway Key Sign up at an OpenAI-compatible gateway for Chinese models. Most offer free trial credits: # I use TokenMaster # Sign up at https://api.tokenmaster.com # Get your API key from the dashboard Step 2: Update Your Client Instantiation Python: # Before: OpenAI only import os from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI ( api_key = os . getenv ( " OPENAI_API_KEY " )) # After: Multi-model access TM_KEY = os . getenv ( " TOKENM

How to Use Chinese LLMs Without a Chinese Phone Number If you've tried signing up for any Chinese AI service, you've seen the same message: Please enter your phone number (+86) to receive a verification code. This single requirement blocks most overseas developers from accessing some of the best-performing and most cost-effective LLMs on the market. This guide covers every workaround I've found — from least to most practical. The Problem China's major AI labs produce world-class models: DeepSeek — DeepSeek V4-Pro matches GPT-4o within 3-5% on coding benchmarks Qwen (Alibaba) — Qwen 3.7-Max beats GPT-4o on long-context tasks (256K tokens) GLM (ZhipuAI) — GLM-4.5 is competitive with Claude for reasoning tasks Baichuan — Strong for Chinese-language generation But every single one requires: A +86 Chinese phone number for registration Alipay or WeChat Pay for billing Chinese-language documentation Method 1: Virtual Chinese Phone Numbers (Fragile) Services like SMS-activate and 5sim offer temporary Chinese phone numbers for ~$1-2. The problem: Chinese providers have gotten aggressive about flagging virtual numbers. Your account gets banned within days. You lose any balance you've added. ❌ Not recommended — too unreliable for production use. Method 2: Third-Party Gateway Services (Recommended) The most practical solution is a gateway that handles the China-side complexity for you. These services: Maintain their own Chinese accounts and infrastructure Register with real Chinese business entities Handle Alipay/WeChat billing on their end Expose everything through a standard OpenAI-compatible API What this means for you: Sign up with email (no phone number needed) Pay via Stripe or PayPal Get a standard API key Use the OpenAI Python/Node.js SDK as-is Migration example (Python): # Before — can't access Chinese models at all # client = OpenAI(api_key="...") # Only works for OpenAI # After — full access to Chinese models client = OpenAI ( base_url = " https://api.tokenmaster.com

How to Access DeepSeek API from Outside China (2026 Guide) DeepSeek has quietly become one of the best open-weight LLM families available. Their V4-Pro model matches GPT-4o within 3-5% on coding benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP) while costing roughly 90% less per token. The problem? Actually getting access as an overseas developer. The Registration Wall If you try to sign up for DeepSeek's official API directly, you'll hit this: ✕ +86 phone number required for SMS verification ✕ Alipay or WeChat Pay only — no Stripe, no PayPal ✕ Documentation is primarily in Chinese ✕ VPN required and it drops mid-request ✕ Different auth system than OpenAI This isn't a minor inconvenience — it's a hard blocker for most overseas developers. I spent a full weekend trying to work around it before finding a solution that actually worked for production use. Option 1: DIY Proxy (Not Recommended) You could technically set up a Chinese VPS as a relay, register through a Chinese friend's number, and proxy requests. I tried this approach. Problems: Your Chinese VPS adds 100-300ms latency You're responsible for keeping the integration working If your Chinese friend's number gets flagged, you're locked out No SLA, no support, no monitoring Payment still requires Alipay — you need a Chinese bank account or a friend After a weekend of futzing with this, I abandoned it. Not production-ready. Option 2: Third-Party Gateway (What I Use) There are now services that handle the China-side complexity and expose DeepSeek through a standard OpenAI-compatible API. They handle: Chinese phone number verification Alipay/WeChat payment (you pay via Stripe instead) API routing with global edge caching Load balancing across multiple Chinese providers Setup is literally two lines: # Before: Direct OpenAI client = OpenAI ( base_url = " https://api.openai.com/v1 " , api_key = OPENAI_KEY ) # After: Via gateway client = OpenAI ( base_url = " https://api.tokenmaster.com/v1 " , api_key = TM_KEY ) That's it. Same SDK, same i

One-time passcodes are everywhere: sign up for a service, log in from a new device, confirm an action, and a six-digit code lands in your email. A human glances at it and types it in. An automated flow, a signup script, an end-to-end test, or an AI agent connecting to a third-party service, can't glance at anything. It has to pull the code out of the mailbox programmatically, and that's a surprisingly fiddly job: the code arrives seconds after a trigger, it's buried in a templated email, and every sender formats it differently. This post covers extracting verification codes from two angles: the nylas CLI , which does it for you in one command, and the Email API pattern you build when it's part of a larger flow. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I just need the code. Two ways to get the code There are two paths depending on what you're building. For terminal workflows, local testing, or scripting a login, the CLI has a dedicated nylas otp command that finds the latest code in a mailbox and hands it to you. For an application or an agent that reacts to incoming mail, you build the extraction into your own flow: catch the message when it arrives, pull the body, and parse the code out. The difference is who drives. The CLI is pull-based: you ask for the latest code when you need it. The API pattern is push-based: a webhook tells you a message arrived, and your code extracts the value as part of handling it. Both end at the same place, a string of digits you feed into whatever's waiting for it, but the CLI is the fast path for a developer and the API pattern is the durable path for a product. In practice you use both: the CLI to learn which sender and code format you're dealing with during development, then that same understanding baked into the application pattern for production. Grab the latest code from the CLI When you've just triggered a code and want it now, nylas otp get finds the most recent one in your default accoun

A webhook endpoint is a public URL sitting on the internet, and anything on the internet can send it a POST . If your app acts on whatever lands there, an attacker who guesses the URL can forge events: fake an inbound email, trigger a workflow, or feed your system garbage. The fix is to confirm two things before you trust a request, that you own the endpoint and that Nylas actually sent the payload, and both are built into how webhooks work. This post covers verifying webhooks from two angles: the HTTP mechanics your endpoint implements, and the nylas CLI for testing a signature without standing up a server. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I'm debugging a signature mismatch. Two layers of webhook trust There are two separate checks, and they happen at different times. The first is a one-time endpoint challenge: when you register or activate a webhook, Nylas sends your URL a request with a challenge value you echo back, proving you control the endpoint. The second runs on every notification afterward: each delivery carries a cryptographic signature you verify against a shared secret, proving the payload is genuine and wasn't tampered with. You need both because they defend against different things. The challenge stops you from accidentally registering an endpoint you don't own and confirms the URL is live. The signature stops anyone else from posting forged events to that URL once it's known. Skip the signature check and your public endpoint will trust any POST that reaches it, which is the most common webhook security mistake. Pass the endpoint challenge The first time you set up a webhook or flip one to active , Nylas sends a GET request to your endpoint with a challenge query parameter. Your endpoint has to return the exact value of that challenge in the body of a 200 OK response, within 10 seconds, or the webhook won't verify. It's a quick handshake that proves the URL is yours and reachable. // Express: echo the ch

Every Nylas request you make on a user's behalf needs one thing first: their permission. Before you can list a mailbox, send on someone's behalf, or read a calendar, the user has to authorize your application through their provider, and that authorization is what's called a grant. Doing the OAuth dance yourself means registering with Google and Microsoft separately, handling each provider's consent screen, token exchange, and refresh quirks. Hosted OAuth collapses that into one flow that works the same across every provider. This post walks through connecting an account from two angles: the HTTP API your web app uses in production, and the nylas CLI for connecting a test account from the terminal. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I need a grant to develop against. What a grant is A grant is an authenticated connection to a single user's account. When a user authorizes your application, Nylas stores the connection and hands you a grant_id , a stable identifier you pass on every subsequent request to act on that user's email, calendar, or contacts. The grant is the unit of access: one user who connected one mailbox is one grant, and everything you build addresses /v3/grants/{grant_id}/... . Keep two credentials distinct here. Your API key authenticates your application to Nylas and goes in the Authorization header on every request; the grant_id identifies which connected user that request acts on. The API key is yours and stays on your backend, while a grant_id is minted per user when they connect. The grant is also where provider differences disappear. A Gmail grant and a Microsoft grant have different OAuth scopes and token mechanics underneath, but once connected, both are just a grant_id you use the same way. That's the point of hosted OAuth: you run one flow, the user picks their provider, and you get back the same kind of identifier regardless of who hosts the mailbox. Hosted OAuth supports Google, Microsoft, Yahoo,

Over the last year or so, I've noticed more developers talking about open source API tools. Not just...

APIs para agentes autónomos: lo que Prowl muestra (y no muestra) El snapshot actual de Prowl lista cinco APIs con score n/a. Eso ya es una señal: ninguna de estas herramientas tiene aún suficiente adopción o señales de ranking. Pero no por eso son irrelevantes. Al contrario, agrupan un patrón común: todas están diseñadas para que un agente de IA opere sin intervención humana directa. Los items y su función Apumail — casilla de correo nativa para agentes. Ofrece una API en texto plano, con negociación de contenido: text/plain para agentes, HTML para humanos. Útil para workflows donde el agente necesita recibir confirmaciones, códigos o enlaces verificables. RogerThat — capa de coordinación entre agentes. Mensajería en tiempo real pensada para que agentes autónomos se comuniquen entre sí. No es un chat humano, es infraestructura de sistema distribuido. DOBI — agente autónomo enfocado en DePIN y activos del mundo real. Ejecuta acciones on-chain dirigidas por un agente de IA. Combina blockchain con decisión autónoma. CIDIF — plataforma para gestionar solicitudes de fondos de I+D. Automatiza el proceso burocrático. No es un agente puro, pero su API podría integrarse con un agente que busque oportunidades de funding. Orquesta — orquestación de pipelines multi-paso para agentes. Permite componer, ejecutar y monitorizar workflows complejos. Es el eslabón que une agentes individuales en procesos coordinados. Patrón detectable Cuatro de cinco herramientas están directamente orientadas a agentes autónomos. La quinta (CIDIF) es una plataforma funcional que puede ser consumida por un agente. Esto indica una dirección clara en el ecosistema: la IA no solo habla con humanos, ahora necesita canales propios, comunicación entre sí, y capacidad de actuar sobre sistemas reales (blockchain, email, workflows). Señales no obvias Score n/a en todas : ninguna ha acumulado suficiente tráfico o votos para generar un score. Esto sugiere que el mercado de APIs para agentes está en etapa tempran

"What time works for everyone?" is a surprisingly hard question to answer in code. You have to read each person's calendar, line up the busy blocks, respect working hours and time zones, leave buffer time between meetings, and only then find the gaps everyone shares. The Nylas Availability API does all of that in one request: hand it a list of participants and a window, and it returns the time slots that actually work. This post covers finding meeting times from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the nylas CLI for the terminal. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I'm checking a calendar. Availability versus Free/Busy There are two endpoints here, and picking the right one saves you work. The Availability endpoint finds bookable slots across a group of participants, applying working hours, buffers, and meeting duration to return times you can actually book. Free/Busy is simpler: it returns the raw busy blocks for one or more email addresses over a window, leaving the slot math to you. Reach for Availability when the question is "when can these people meet?" and you want the answer as a list of open slots. Reach for Free/Busy when you only need to see when calendars are busy, for example to gray out times in a custom UI. Availability is a POST /v3/calendars/availability , an application-level call that takes participants by email, while Free/Busy is grant-scoped at POST /v3/grants/{grant_id}/calendars/free-busy . This post focuses on Availability, since that's the one that answers the scheduling question directly. Find a time across participants The core request lists the participants and the window to search. Each participant is identified by email and must be associated with a valid Nylas grant, since the endpoint reads their calendars. You set start_time and end_time as Unix timestamps for the search window, duration_minutes for how long the meeting is, and interval_minutes for how the candidate start times ar

Writing a clear, well-structured email takes time, and it's the kind of task an LLM is genuinely good at. But wiring up your own prompt-to-email pipeline means picking a model, threading the original message in as context, handling streaming, and keeping it all behind your API keys. The Nylas Smart Compose endpoints do that for you: send a natural-language prompt, get back a written message body, and the reply variant pulls in the original email as context automatically. This post walks through Smart Compose from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the nylas CLI for the terminal. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I'm testing a prompt. How Smart Compose works Smart Compose is two endpoints that turn a prompt into a message body. You send a natural-language prompt , and the response comes back with a suggestion field holding the generated text. There's a POST /messages/smart-compose for writing a brand-new message, and a POST /messages/{message_id}/smart-compose for writing a reply, where the original message is folded into the context so the response actually answers it. The key thing to understand is that Smart Compose generates text, it doesn't send anything. The suggestion it returns is a message body you do something with: pass it straight to the Send Message endpoint , or pre-fill it into a draft for a human to review and edit first. That separation is deliberate, since it lets you put a person between the AI's output and the recipient, which is usually what you want for anything an LLM wrote. Two things to know before you start. Smart Compose runs against connected OAuth grants only, not Agent Accounts. The prompt also has a ceiling: up to 1,000 tokens, and a longer prompt returns an error. Generate a new message To write a fresh email, POST /v3/grants/{grant_id}/messages/smart-compose takes a single prompt describing what you want. The response carries the generated body in suggestion , which you then se

Email is how most files still move between people: the signed contract, the PDF invoice, the logo embedded in a newsletter. If your app sends or processes mail, it has to handle attachments, and doing that against each provider means Gmail's attachment encoding, Microsoft Graph's, and raw MIME for IMAP. The Nylas Email API gives you one model for both directions: attach files to outbound messages with the same call you use to send, and pull files off inbound messages with a read-only Attachments API. This post covers both halves from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the nylas CLI for the terminal. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I'm checking a file came through. Two APIs: one to attach, one to read There's a split worth understanding up front. You add attachments through the Messages or Drafts API, as part of sending or saving a message, and you read existing attachments through the dedicated Attachments API. The Attachments API is read-only: it downloads bytes and returns metadata, but it never adds files. That division keeps the model simple, since attaching is part of composing a message and reading is a separate concern. The size of what you're attaching decides how you encode it on the way out. Small files ride inline in the JSON request, larger ones move to a multipart request, and very large files use a separate upload step. On the way in, every attachment, regardless of how it was sent, is fetched the same way: by its attachment_id together with the message_id it belongs to. Get those two ideas straight and the rest is mechanical. Attach a small file inline with Base64 For files that keep the whole request under 3 MB, the simplest path is the application/json schema. You pass each attachment in an attachments array with its content_type , filename , and the file bytes as a Base64-encoded content string. The 3 MB ceiling covers the entire HTTP request, not just the file, so it's the right path for

How I Stopped Burning Cash on Token Limits — A CTO's Field Notes Three months ago, I was staring at our monthly AI bill wondering where it all went wrong. We'd built what I thought was a pretty elegant LLM pipeline. Production-ready, observability wired up, the whole nine yards. Then the invoices started arriving, and I realized I had built a money furnace. Our token consumption was spiking 3x week over week, the 429s were everywhere, and our latency had become a meme inside the company. This is the post I wish I'd had six months ago. If you're a technical founder or a CTO running LLM workloads at scale, bookmark this. I'm going to walk you through the exact architecture decisions, the exact numbers, and the exact code that took us from "this bill is going to kill us" to "oh, this is actually manageable." The Real Problem Nobody Talks About Here's the dirty secret about running LLM-powered products: token limit errors aren't really about token limits. They're a symptom of a much deeper architectural problem. When your app throws "context length exceeded" at 2am, what it's really telling you is that you didn't think hard enough about prompt design, document chunking, model selection, and cost routing on day one. I learned this the hard way. My team was defaulting to GPT-4o for everything because, honestly, it works and the API is reliable. We were paying $2.50 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens. For a startup processing millions of documents a month, that math is brutal. We were essentially funding OpenAI's next training run with our Series A. The wake-up call came when I ran the actual numbers. Our average request was burning through maybe 8K input tokens and producing 2K output tokens. At our volume, we were spending more on inference than on two senior engineers. That is not a sustainable burn rate for a 12-person company. The Architecture Decision That Changed Everything The first question I asked myself wasn't "which model is cheapest?

I’ve been shipping code since before most people even knew what Git was. I've seen entire architectures built around point-to-point API integrations that were beautiful for a quarter, and then became unmaintainable monoliths by the second year. If you spend any time in enterprise software development—especially anything touching customer data or HR pipelines—you run into integration hell. The modern AI agent promises to be this universal connective tissue, right? It sounds simple enough: give it access, and boom, productivity magic. But let’s be real about what that means under the hood. When an LLM is given a tool schema, how does it get data from five wildly different systems—Salesforce for contacts, Workday for employees, Zendesk for tickets, Greenhouse for candidates? The naive approach, and frankly, most teams still take it this way, is to build bespoke orchestration services. You create a microservice that accepts an input query (e.g., 'What did Jane do last month?') and then contains specialized logic: if the name format looks like a CRM record, call salesforce_api ; if it sounds HR-related, hit workday_endpoint , etc. This is debt acceleration disguised as architecture. You are not building an integration layer; you are building a brittle routing table that requires human intervention every time one of the underlying APIs changes its schema or rate limit structure. It’s glue code for glue code's sake, and it has a massive maintenance overhead. The core problem is that most agents see data sources as functional silos , not integrated components of a single operational truth. Your CRM thinks about accounts; your HRIS thinks about job codes; your ATS tracks keywords. They all speak different dialects of 'person' or 'business unit.' When an agent needs to know, say, which employees (HRIS) are currently candidates in the pipeline (ATS) who also have a linked account record (CRM), you hit a wall. The solution isn't more specialized microservices. The solution is s