Candescentcandescent.com
Candescent's API design foundation is strong, and documentation is reachable and crawlable — but the partner program has critical gaps that will stall integrations before they start. There is no self-service onboarding path (no portal, no quickstart, no code samples, no changelog), and partners' AI agents cannot reliably execute workflows against the API (no sandbox, no idempotency or rate-limit guidance, no runnable collection).
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about4 pass1 warn0 fail89A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable, versioned contractvia spec | 25/25 | Versioning declared (info.version="1.9.0") and header-versioning detected. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | A current OpenAPI version with a declared versioning scheme lets agents reason about the contract. |
| pass | Auth declared & discoverablevia spec | 25/25 | Authentication required (global or on every operation). Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | Agents can only authenticate when auth is declared, scoped, and discoverable. |
| pass | Security & governance hygienevia spec | 15/15 | No credential-shaped strings detected in spec. Investigated: spec 100%, wellknown 0%. | No leaked secrets, no critical lint violations, no OWASP API Top-10 spec smells, and a published vulnerability-disclosure channel. |
| warn | Schema coverage & depthvia spec | 12.5/25 | High parameter complexity (avg 5.1 params/op + nested params). Investigated: spec 50%. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| pass | Example coveragevia spec | 10/10 | 54% example coverage (target 80%+). Investigated: spec 100%, docs 0%. | Examples carry shape semantics schemas under-specify — for humans and agents alike. |
Developer ExperienceThe context both developers and agents need to integrate fast — onboarding, code samples, complete descriptions and worked examples1 pass0 warn4 fail43F
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Description completenessvia spec | 15/15 | 85% description completeness (target 90%+). Investigated: spec 100%. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| fail | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 0/29 | No self-service signup detected: no signup link found on the homepage or docs, and no conventional signup path (/signup, /sign-up, /register, /get-started, /console/signup, /dashboard/signup, /try, /try-free, /free, /free-trial, /start, /start-free, /join, /create-account, /account/signup, /auth/signup, /users/sign_up) resolved. Investigated: docs 0%. | Self-serve key/account creation is the fast first call for partners, with no sales gate. |
| fail | Quickstart presentvia docs | 0/25 | No quickstart/getting-started page found at the conventional paths. Investigated: docs 0%. | A quickstart is the fastest path from landing page to first successful call. |
| fail | Code samples in docsvia docs | 0/18 | No detectable code samples across 1 sampled docs pages. Investigated: docs 0%. | Multi-language samples shorten time-to-first-call. |
| fail | Changelog publishedvia spec | 0/13 | No changelog URL or mention found in spec metadata. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | A published changelog lets partners track changes without surprise. |
Agent DiscoveryPartners and their agents can find your APIs — llms.txt, registries, crawlable and reachable docs0 pass3 warn1 fail57D
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| warn | Docs reachable, not hard auth-gatedvia docs | 22.5/30 | Server ignores Accept: text/markdown header (0/1 pages return markdown). Investigated: docs 75%. | Agents can only index and fetch docs they can reach — past auth gates and over correct HTTP semantics. |
| warn | Registry & SDK presencevia sdk | 14/28 | Discovered SDKs in only 1 language(s); target ≥3. Investigated: sdk 50%, docs 0%, cli 0%, mcp 0%, wellknown 0%. | Listing in MCP registries and publishing SDKs puts the API where agents and their tooling look. |
| warn | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 6/12 | No sitemap discoverable via robots.txt or /sitemap.xml on the docs host. Investigated: wellknown 50%. | Bots allowed plus a fresh sitemap make docs findable by agent crawlers. |
| fail | llms.txt present, valid & comprehensivevia docs | 0/30 | No llms.txt found at any candidate location (https://developer.candescent.com/llms.txt, https://developer.candescent.com/docs/llms.txt). Investigated: docs 0%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
Agent UnderstandingAgents can correctly interpret your APIs — machine-readable errors, consistent descriptions, structured data, parseable docs2 pass1 warn2 fail76B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via docs | 28/28 | 16 distinct 4xx/5xx response codes documented. Investigated: docs 100%, spec 50%. | RFC 9457 problem details and a documented error-code inventory let agents parse failures without burning tokens. |
| pass | Operation purpose clarityvia spec | 25/25 | 99% of operations have a clear summary + operationId an agent can select on. Investigated: spec 100%. | Agents select the right endpoint from its summary + operationId; clear, named operations make tool-selection reliable — the strongest driver of correct tool choice. |
| warn | Agent-navigable, token-efficient docsvia docs | 12.6/22 | 1 of 1 pages appear to be client-side rendered SPA shells (root detected); agents using HTTP fetches will see no content. Investigated: docs 57%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| fail | Agent instructions file (AGENTS.md)via wellknown | 0/10 | No AGENTS.md at the site root or /.well-known/. Investigated: wellknown 0%. | An AGENTS.md gives coding agents explicit setup, auth, and usage instructions to interpret and operate the API — beyond llms.txt's link index. |
| fail | Docs structured datavia docs | 0/8 | Neither JSON-LD nor OpenGraph/meta tags detected across 1 assessed pages (1 JS-rendered). Investigated: docs 0%. | Structured data (JSON-LD/schema.org) on docs pages gives agents an unambiguous parse target and is what answer engines cite. Detected on the JS-rendered head (Firecrawl) for a bounded page budget, so JS-injected JSON-LD is now caught; pages we can't render are excluded rather than failed. |
| na | Description consistency across surfaces | —/7 | Only 1 surface description(s) with ≥6 tokens available; need at least 2 to compare. | Every surface tells the same story about what the product is. |
Agent UsabilityAgents have the context to use your APIs reliably, not just find them0 pass0 warn5 fail40F
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fail | Idempotency documentedvia spec | 0/27 | 0% of mutating operations document idempotency. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | Documented idempotency lets agents retry safely. |
| fail | Rate-limit signalingvia spec | 0/22 | No rate-limit response headers documented. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | Machine-readable rate-limit headers let agents throttle adaptively. |
| fail | Pagination documented & consistentvia spec | 0/22 | 1 list endpoint(s) exist but no pagination params found. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | Consistent, documented pagination lets agents traverse collections. |
| fail | Sandbox separationvia spec | 0/20 | No sandbox/test server declared across 1 server entries; no test-key prefixes documented. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | An isolated environment lets agents exercise destructive operations safely. |
| fail | Runnable collection with test scriptsvia platform | 0/9 | No public Postman workspace discovered for the org. Investigated: platform 0%. | A public, maintained collection with assertions is runnable truth agents validate against. |
Resources Discovered
The public resources we found for Candescent — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.
| APIs analyzed | 1 — Candescent DI API |
|---|