Ideogram Fixture-First Development Loop

Overview

Develop the Ideogram boundary against owned request and response contracts before spending credit. Model multipart fields, asynchronous lifecycle states, unsafe outputs, transient errors, and expiring URLs as fixtures so the fast loop remains deterministic and privacy-safe.

Prerequisites

• The repository's adapter seam, test runner, fixture policy, and data classification.
• Sanitized synthetic examples for success, unsafe output, validation failure, throttling, and terminal failure.
• An opt-in live-smoke flag that is disabled by default and on untrusted forks.

Current Contract

Current generation surfaces include V4 synchronous and asynchronous routes, transparent variants, P-Image, and V3 compatibility routes. Async work returns a generation_id; status is reconciled by appending that returned value to GET /v1/generations/ or by receiving a webhook. Returned asset URLs are temporary.

Authentication

Fixtures must not contain credentials. When a separately approved live lane runs, inject IDEOGRAM_API_KEY server-side and send it only in the Api-Key header to the configured first-party host.