Why Free AI Endpoints Need Contract Probes, Not Just Try-Except Blocks

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Free AI API endpoints can return HTTP 200 status codes while still delivering malformed, truncated, or structurally unexpected JSON responses that break downstream code. Common integrations relying solely on json.loads inside a try block fail to catch valid but wrongly shaped responses, such as a missing field that silently writes null values into production records. A contract probe — a small, deterministic test request run at the integration boundary — checks transport, shape, cost, and error contracts before the rest of the system processes any data. The probe does not evaluate model quality but instead verifies that the endpoint can fulfill a known response structure at a given moment. A minimal Python implementation using only the standard library can validate required fields, data types, response size, and token usage without any external dependencies.

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