How to verify Claude API parameter suggestions
Claude confidently describes API parameters that have the wrong name — and they fail silently at runtime. Here's how to catch them before they hit production.
Why Claude produces these errors
Claude has absorbed enormous quantities of SDK documentation, but parameter names change across versions and between similar SDKs. When Claude has seen many SDKs with a parameter named one thing, it applies that name to a different SDK where the parameter has a different name. The semantic meaning is correct — the specific string is wrong. These errors are particularly insidious because they often don't throw exceptions; the wrong parameter is silently ignored.
Impact if not caught
Silent parameter failures are among the hardest categories of runtime bugs to trace. The code runs, appears to work, but behaves incorrectly — because the configuration you set was silently ignored. This can result in security misconfigurations, wrong timeouts, or unexpected behavior in production.
Live example — what this looks like
The example below is an illustrative recreation of the type of error this AI commonly produces — not a transcript of an actual AI session.
How do I set a custom request timeout with the Anthropic Python SDK?
To configure a custom timeout with the Anthropic Python SDK, pass `request_timeout` to the client constructor: `client = anthropic.Anthropic(api_key='...', request_timeout=60.0)`. This sets a 60-second timeout for all API requests made through that client instance.
Wrong parameter name: The Anthropic Python SDK uses `timeout` (not `request_timeout`) as the constructor parameter. Passing `request_timeout=60.0` is silently ignored; the SDK default timeout applies instead.
Verol highlights the specific claim and shows you what's wrong — automatically, before you finish reading.
How to verify api parameter names manually
Search github.com/anthropics/anthropic-sdk-python for the `__init__` signature of the `Anthropic` class. Constructor parameters are listed explicitly in the type signatures.
docs.anthropic.com has SDK configuration references. Search for 'timeout' — the correct parameter name appears in the official examples.
Print `client.timeout` or equivalent after construction. If the value doesn't reflect what you passed, the parameter name was wrong.
Or skip the manual steps — Verol does this automatically
Verol works in your browser alongside Claude. It extracts every verifiable claim in the response and checks each one against primary sources in real time — before you finish reading. No extra steps, no copy-pasting.
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