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Ask Claude to Add Idempotency Keys to Your API

bagwaa @bagwaa · Mar 26, 2026 · Workflows
ask-claude-to-add-idempotency-keys-to-your-api

Network errors are inevitable. Without idempotency, a client that retries a failed payment request might charge the user twice. Idempotency keys fix this at the API layer — and Claude can wire them up across your endpoints.

Add idempotency key support to our POST /orders and POST /payments endpoints. Clients
should send an Idempotency-Key header. Cache the response for 24 hours keyed by that
value so retries return the identical response without re-processing the request.
Use Redis for the cache.

Claude will generate the middleware that checks for an existing cached response and returns it immediately on duplicate requests, or executes and stores the response on first use. It handles the full response — status code, headers, and body.

Harden it further:

Add validation that rejects requests where the same Idempotency-Key is used with
a different request body — return a 422 with an error message explaining the conflict.

For extra reliability, ask Claude to add a unique constraint at the database level as a second guard against race conditions on concurrent duplicate requests.

Stripe, Braintree, and most payment processors implement this pattern — it's what makes retrying safe.

Idempotency keys are what separate a toy API from one you'd trust with real money.

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