SDK
An SDK (software development kit) is an official client library that wraps an API's HTTP interface in idiomatic code for a specific language, handling authentication, serialization, and often retries and pagination, so integrators call typed methods instead of constructing raw requests. Many API providers generate their SDKs from the OpenAPI spec, keeping library and interface in lockstep.
Coding agents are heavy SDK users: asked to integrate an API, they reach for the official library and reproduce the patterns the documentation shows. That makes SDK examples in the docs load-bearing — the agent scaffolds what the examples demonstrate, including their error handling and credential hygiene.
Version drift is the dominant failure mode. A model's training data contains older SDK releases, so an agent will confidently call methods that were renamed or removed. Docs that state the current major version, show current method signatures, and keep a migration guide adjacent give the model the correction signal it needs; per-version documentation URLs make it worse when the agent lands on an old one unlabeled.
SDK-only documentation carries its own risk for agents working in languages the provider does not ship: if the raw HTTP interface is documented only implicitly through SDK calls, an agent that must construct requests directly is left reverse-engineering the wire format.
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