Introduction

A stitch is a typed, declarative, composable unit that turns one endpoint into a resilient, validated, observable function. You declare it once; your code calls it, the CLI runs it, and an agent invokes it — without any of them ever touching a credential.

That is the whole idea, and the rest of these docs are an expansion of it. A stitch is atomic (one endpoint at a time, no spec required) and it hands the caller a capability, not a secret. Everything that normally rots in a src/api/ folder — auth lifecycle, retries, validation, drift detection, tracing — folds into the call itself.

The pain it removes

Most integrations start as a thin wrapper over fetch that returns opaque bytes, and then every reliability concern gets re-implemented by hand at each call site, separately, where it quietly drifts out of date. A stitch replaces that wrapper with a declaration:

• No spec, no codegen, no server. A stitch needs a URL and an example response — so it works on the long tail of internal and undocumented APIs that never get a complete OpenAPI document.
• Auth is a boundary. Bearer, API key, cookie sessions, OAuth2 client credentials — the stitch owns the secret and its lifecycle, and the caller receives data, never the credential.
• Resilience is declared. Retry with backoff, proactive throttling, and real timeouts are configuration, uniform across every stitch.
• Validation and drift are live. Responses are validated on every call, and a silently renamed field surfaces as a loud, leveled drift signal instead of an undefined three layers downstream.
• Observability ships with it. Every call emits a typed event stream, traced to a local JSONL log by default — no collector, nothing to deploy.

The smallest stitch

The smallest stitch is a URL. Declare it once, call it as a typed function:

import { stitch } from 'stitchapi';

const getUsers = stitch('https://api.example.com/users');

const users = await getUsers(); // GET, parsed JSON

That is the entire surface for a basic call. Adding path params, an output schema, auth, and resilience is the job of the Quickstart, which walks the full first run end to end.

How this documentation is organized

The docs are seven top-level sections, ordered for a first read. Start at the top and move down, or jump straight to the section that matches what you need.

Next steps