Cockroachlabscockroachlabs.com
CockroachLabs' API program shows genuine strength in documentation discoverability and structured data quality, giving partners a solid starting point. However, the program has critical gaps in operational reliability and safe integration — partners and their AI agents cannot confidently run real workflows without idempotency guidance, rate-limit signaling, or a proper sandbox environment.
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about3 pass1 warn1 fail88A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable, versioned contractvia spec | 25/25 | Versioning declared (info.version="2024-09-16") and date-based-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. |
| warn | Schema coverage & depthvia spec | 20.8/25 | Medium parameter complexity (avg 1.9 params/op; nested/body schemas present). Investigated: spec 83%, sdk 0%. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| 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. |
| fail | Example coveragevia spec | 0/10 | 3% example coverage. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%, sdk 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 examples3 pass1 warn1 fail75B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 29/29 | Signup page at https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/; no free-tier language detected in docs/pricing. Investigated: docs 100%. | Self-serve key/account creation is the fast first call for partners, with no sales gate. |
| pass | Description completenessvia spec | 15/15 | 69% description completeness (target 90%+). Investigated: spec 100%. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| pass | Changelog publishedvia sdk | 13/13 | Newest official SDK activity 11 day(s) ago. Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%. | A published changelog lets partners track changes without surprise. |
| warn | Quickstart presentvia docs | 12.5/25 | Quickstart page reachable (1 variants scanned starting at https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/) but no runnable code sample detected in HTML or .md variant. Investigated: docs 50%. | 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 15 sampled docs pages. Investigated: docs 0%. | Multi-language samples shorten time-to-first-call. |
Agent DiscoveryPartners and their agents can find your APIs — llms.txt, registries, crawlable and reachable docs3 pass1 warn0 fail83A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Docs reachable, not hard auth-gatedvia docs | 30/30 | All 1 pages are publicly accessible. Investigated: docs 100%. | Agents can only index and fetch docs they can reach — past auth gates and over correct HTTP semantics. |
| pass | Registry & SDK presencevia cli | 28/28 | CLI documented with install instructions (download, download). Investigated: cli 100%, sdk 88%, docs 0%. | Listing in MCP registries and publishing SDKs puts the API where agents and their tooling look. |
| pass | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 12/12 | Docs paths crawlable by all monitored AI agents. Investigated: wellknown 100%. | Bots allowed plus a fresh sitemap make docs findable by agent crawlers. |
| warn | llms.txt present, valid & comprehensivevia docs | 10/30 | No llms.txt found at any candidate location (https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/llms.txt, https://www.cockroachlabs.com/llms.txt, https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/llms.txt). Investigated: docs 33%. | 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 pass2 warn2 fail80A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via docs | 28/28 | 5 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 | 100% 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 | 19.8/22 | 1 of 1 pages have substantive content differences between markdown and HTML (avg 22% missing). Investigated: docs 90%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| warn | Docs structured datavia docs | 4/8 | JSON-LD on 1/11 assessed pages, but coverage is sparse or dateModified is missing. Investigated: docs 50%. | 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. |
| 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 | Description consistency across surfaces | 0/7 | Mean pairwise description similarity across 2 surfaces (docs, sdk) is 0% (threshold 35% for full credit). | 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 warn4 fail40F
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fail | Idempotency documentedvia spec | 0/27 | 1% 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 | 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. |
| na | Pagination documented & consistent | —/22 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Consistent, documented pagination lets agents traverse collections. |
Resources Discovered
The public resources we found for Cockroachlabs — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.
| APIs analyzed | 1 — CockroachDB Cloud API |
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