Launch readiness: brand, the live demo, and a refusal that was wrong

[charlespers]

Three changes ahead of today's SDK launch.

1. The prompt refusal denied a door that exists

fromOpenRouter / from_openrouter refused OpenRouter's legacy prompt field with "the legacy text-completion prompt field has no Conifer door".

Measured against api.conifer.build today:

POST /v1/completions  {"model":"claude-haiku-4-5","prompt":"say OK"}  -> 200
POST /v1/completions  {"model":"gpt-5.6-luna","prompt":"say OK"}     -> 200, x-conifer-cost-nanousd: 6400

The door exists, bills, and returns the full receipt header set. Only streaming is refused there, and it names /v1/chat/completions when it does. conifer.build already documented this correctly (setup/drop-in), so the SDK was the single surface telling a migrating caller the opposite — the exact failure mode the portability card exists to prevent, pointed the other way.

The shim still throws, because it converts to the chat wire and this client does not drive that door. But the message now names the door and the streaming caveat instead of denying it.

2. The README opens with the brand and the product working

• The Conifer mark, theme-aware via <picture> (transparent-alpha PNG already served from conifer.build).
• The router demo that is live on the landing page, as a clickable still.

GitHub sanitizes <video> with a remote src, so a poster-and-link is the form that actually renders — and the same markup works on npm and PyPI, which is why the still is committed and referenced by absolute raw URL.

The still is frame 14s, not the shipped poster. The poster is the opening frame: an almost-empty terminal that shows none of the routing. 14s shows the router panel resolving to kimi-k3 and the 3s answer, which is the claim being made. Every timing in the copy (3s, 1m 7s, 50s runtime) was checked against the frames.

3. Cut the passages that read as internal notes

• A ten-line essay on macOS CA trust stores sat between the API key and the first code sample. Now one sentence and a link, with the reasoning in its own ## Python and TLS section — where someone hitting CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED will actually look.
• Two sections opened with the same "offline tests can only confirm what we already believed" line and then listed the same defects. Merged.
• The README closed on a five-item bug diary from an internal QA pass, in the position where a reader decides whether to install. The point that the live gate finds real defects survives in one sentence; the post-mortem is not product docs.
• npm test says 162; the README said 145.

3835 -> 3619 words, no claim removed.

Gate

From this clone: npm test 162 pass, pytest 105 pass, typecheck and build clean. npm run qa:live 20/20 green against api.conifer.build.

The tree here is byte-identical to git subtree split --prefix=sdk of the workspace repo at bcf89ef.

[greptile-apps]

Greptile Summary

The PR refreshes the launch-facing README and corrects the OpenRouter prompt refusal so it accurately identifies the gateway’s non-streaming completions endpoint.

• Adds branded README media, navigation, and a live router demonstration.
• Consolidates TLS, testing, and live-gateway documentation.
• Aligns the TypeScript, Python, and portability-card refusal text for legacy completion prompts.

Confidence Score: 5/5

The PR appears safe to merge, with no concrete changed-code defect identified.

The executable changes only revise an existing portability error message, consistently across both SDKs and their contract, while the documentation and media changes align with the described launch behavior.

Important Files Changed

Filename	Overview
README.md	Reorganizes launch documentation, adds branded demo media, and consolidates installation and live-verification guidance without an identified actionable defect.
cards/portability.card.json	Corrects the migration contract to distinguish the gateway’s supported completions endpoint from the chat-only portability shim.
src/portability/openrouter.ts	Updates the TypeScript prompt refusal guidance while preserving the existing refusal behavior.
python/conifer_sdk/portability.py	Mirrors the corrected prompt refusal guidance in the Python shim.
docs/media/router-demo.jpg	Adds the still image referenced by the README’s router demonstration.

_{Reviews (1): Last reviewed commit: "Launch readiness: brand, the live demo, ..." | Re-trigger Greptile}