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Using llms.txt for API Integration: Reton’s Interswitch VAS Case Study

Gabriel R Mogaji’s Reton case study uses llms.txt to find focused Interswitch VAS documentation for an AI coding assistant, while keeping wallet balances and payment decisions within the application.
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In Gabriel R Mogaji’s account of building Reton, an AI coding assistant became more useful for integrating Interswitch Quickteller VAS when it was given the right product documentation through llms.txt—and kept away from decisions about wallet balances and payment outcomes. The case study’s central lesson is that better documentation discovery can guide implementation, but it cannot replace a wallet’s own ledger, server-side controls, or verification of provider results.

Why the documentation choice mattered

Reton is described as a digital wallet for African users, with a double-entry ledger and protected transfers. The case study concerns adding value-added services—airtime, data, electricity, and television payments—through Interswitch Quickteller VAS.

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Mogaji says the challenge was not simply finding API documentation. An AI coding tool needed the pages for the exact service being integrated, rather than material for a neighboring product such as bills payment, airtime e-pins, or send-money. If the assistant receives the wrong product instructions, it can produce plausible-looking code for the wrong API surface.

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How the llms.txt workflow helps

The case study describes Interswitch’s llms.txt as a plain-text catalogue containing documentation titles, links, and short descriptions. The author also says that adding .md to a documentation URL returns the page in Markdown. In this workflow, the index helps locate likely references, while Markdown gives the coding assistant a more direct form of the selected documentation.

  1. Start with the index. Find pages relevant to the specific VAS operation rather than treating the whole vendor catalogue as one API specification.
  2. Check the product surface. Confirm that each selected page applies to the intended service and task; similar product names do not establish that endpoints or transaction rules are interchangeable.
  3. Provide a short reference set. Give the assistant only the pages needed for the current implementation task, instead of pasting the entire index or large amounts of browser-oriented HTML.
  4. Trace implementation details back to the documentation. In particular, verify required fields, request references, biller configuration, and result handling against the authoritative page for that operation.

This is a discovery and context-management technique, not proof that generated code is correct. The index points toward documentation; it does not establish that the documentation is current for a particular account, environment, or merchant configuration.

Keep the wallet ledger separate from the payment rail

In Mogaji’s described architecture, Reton owns customer balances, ledger entries, recovery, and the customer experience. Interswitch supplies payment services underneath that wallet. The distinction matters: a provider API call should not become an alternate way for application components—or an AI-generated integration—to change wallet balances.

The author says provider HTTP calls sit behind a gateway, while the ledger service is the only component permitted to alter wallet balances. That boundary keeps payment-provider communication separate from the wallet’s accounting authority. It also gives the application a defined place to handle provider responses without treating a browser redirect as a ledger instruction.

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What the payment flow must establish

The case study describes checks before a wallet-funded bill payment: authentication, idempotency, a PIN where configured, KYC limits, and fraud controls. The payment call then proceeds through the server-side integration, with wallet accounting based on the resulting provider outcome.

  • Approved payment: record the successful payment after approval.
  • Clear decline: reverse the wallet debit.
  • Timeout or pending result: leave the payment unresolved and seek server-side confirmation. Do not treat a client redirect or query parameter as proof of success.

The important distinction is between a known decline and an unknown outcome. A timeout does not by itself show whether the provider completed the transaction. Releasing or finalizing funds on the basis of an unverified client-side signal can make the wallet’s records diverge from the payment provider’s state.

Configuration and inquiry details are not safe to guess

The case study warns that biller payment codes depend on merchant and environment, and says the placeholder values listed for Reton are not production codes. Those values should not be copied into another integration as if they were universal identifiers. Obtain the applicable configuration for the merchant and environment from the appropriate authoritative source.

Mogaji also identifies customer validation and inquiry-defined amounts for some electricity and television payments as gaps in the implementation described. Where an inquiry determines the payable amount, a fixed or guessed amount is not a substitute for the required inquiry flow. The account does not establish that every VAS product uses the same validation or amount rules.

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What this case study does—and does not—show

This is Mogaji’s first-person account of Reton’s integration approach, not an independently audited description of production behavior. It provides no measured time savings, reliability results, or evidence that the described implementation is production-ready. It also does not verify current Interswitch documentation, merchant-specific values, or the present behavior of the APIs.

For developers, the reusable method is narrower and more practical: use a documentation index to find product-specific references, give the assistant a focused set of those references, and keep financial authority in explicit application services. Validate every implementation-critical detail against current documentation and the configuration for the actual merchant and environment before relying on it.

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