provider-canary
Provider Canary
Mocks and harnesses prove that your code does what you think the provider wants. Only the provider can tell you what it actually wants. The gap between the two is where integrations fail: a field the schema calls optional that one service requires, an HTTP 201 that carries a refusal, a fee the documentation never says who keeps.
A provider canary closes that gap with a small, deliberate, reversible call to the real provider, using the exact payload the application sends, followed by cleanup that is itself verified. It is not "test in production". It is the provider-side counterpart of confirming a finding against the running system: the repository cannot tell you how an external API behaves today.
The procedure below is ordered. Each step exists because skipping it produced a wrong answer at least once.