FAQ
Each answer below is written to stand on its own — no marketing, no "it depends". If yours is missing, ask us directly.
Patchline is a change-intelligence service for the external APIs your code depends on. It reads the changelogs, OpenAPI specs, and SDK releases of providers such as Stripe, OpenAI, and Anthropic, classifies each change as breaking, behavioral, or additive, maps it to the exact call sites it affects in your repository, and responds with a blast-radius report or a test-validated migration pull request.
An API blast radius is the set of locations in a codebase that one upstream API change actually affects. Patchline computes it by statically indexing every SDK call site in your repository, then matching each provider change event against that index with a confidence score — so a deprecation notice becomes a concrete list of file-and-line locations instead of a changelog entry someone has to interpret.
Dependency bots watch your package manifest and raise the version number when a new release ships. Patchline watches the provider itself — changelogs, OpenAPI spec diffs, SDK releases — and works at the call-site level: it tells you which lines of your code a breaking change touches, and when its confidence gates pass, it writes the code migration and validates it against your own test suite.
No. Patchline never merges anything. When a change is high-confidence — the generated patch applies cleanly and your test suite passes in a network-isolated sandbox — it opens a pull request for you to review, complete with the upstream evidence and test output. When confidence is below the bar, you get a migration report instead. Auto-merge is a deliberate non-goal, not a missing feature.
Patchline requests read-only access to repository contents plus write access limited to issues and pull-request branches. Your source is downloaded to a temporary directory, indexed for dependency and call-site information, then deleted — only the derived index is stored, never your code. Migration validation runs in a sandbox with networking disabled, so neither your code nor your tests can reach the outside world.
Patchline currently tracks Stripe, OpenAI, and Anthropic — changelogs, OpenAPI specification diffs, and SDK releases — and indexes call sites in TypeScript and Python codebases. Provider coverage is designed to expand: each source is a small adapter over a shared change-event pipeline. Additional languages follow the same pattern, but TypeScript and Python are the deliberate initial scope rather than a technical ceiling.
Patchline is onboarding design partners now. Installation is a GitHub App: you pick the repositories, Patchline indexes them, and reports begin arriving as labeled issues — the migration agent stays off until you explicitly opt a repository in. Teams with five to fifty external API dependencies see the most value. Email rvasqz86@gmail.com and we will set you up within a day.