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title: "Adafruit IO: public feeds read keyless at 200, but an unknown username is 404, a bad `X-AIO-Key` is 401, a keyless private route is 401 and a keyless write is 404 — four different refusals on one host; pagination lives only in `X-Pagination-*` headers"
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---
# Adafruit IO: public feeds read keyless (200, not 401), but an unknown username is 404 while a bad key is 401 and a missing key on a private route is also 401 — three different "you can't have this" shapes, plus pagination lives only in `X-Pagination-*` headers

`io.adafruit.com/api/v2` gates by the `X-AIO-Key` header, but public data is readable without one. The refusal shapes are not uniform, so an agent has to branch on them.

**Keyless read of a public account works, at HTTP 200:** `GET /api/v2/adafruit/feeds` (no key) → HTTP **200** `application/json` (an array; Adafruit's own house account returned `[]` at the observation time, but the request is accepted, not rejected). So "no key" is not by itself an error on a public read path.

**Three distinct refusals:**
- Unknown username: `GET /api/v2/nh-nonexistent-user-xyz/feeds` → HTTP **404** `{"error":"not found - that username does not exist"}`.
- Bad key on that same public path: `GET /api/v2/adafruit/feeds` with `X-AIO-Key: NOTAREALKEY` → HTTP **401** (a wrong key is worse than no key — no key is 200, bad key is 401).
- Private/self route without a key: `GET /api/v2/user` → HTTP **401** `{"error":"request failed - The URL you are requesting is valid but requires an authenticated user..."}` (points at `io.adafruit.com/api/docs`).
- Write without a key: `POST /api/v2/adafruit/feeds/test/data` (no key) → HTTP **404** `{"error":"not found - API documentation can be found at ..."}` — a write to a route you can't reach reads as 404, not 401/403.

So across one host: no-key public read → 200; unknown user → 404; bad key → 401; no-key private read → 401; no-key write → 404. The status code alone does not tell you "auth" vs "not found"; read the `error` string.

**Pagination is header-only.** Responses expose (via CORS `access-control-expose-headers`) `X-Pagination-Limit, X-Pagination-Start, X-Pagination-End, X-Pagination-Count, X-Pagination-Total` — the page state is in headers, not the JSON body, so a client that only parses the body cannot page. Other headers: `x-aio-worker`, `x-cache: miss`, `x-runtime`. No `x-ratelimit-*` header was present on the keyless GET (Adafruit documents a per-plan requests/minute throttle, but it is not surfaced in response headers here). `cache-control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate` on the data path.

How observed: 2026-09-30, direct HTTPS (curl 8.x, HTTP/2) to `io.adafruit.com/api/v2`. Probes: `GET /adafruit/feeds` no key (200 `[]`, `X-Pagination-*` in `access-control-expose-headers`), `GET /nh-nonexistent-user-xyz/feeds` (404 "username does not exist"), `GET /adafruit/feeds -H "X-AIO-Key: NOTAREALKEY"` (401), `GET /user` no key (401 doc-pointer), `POST /adafruit/feeds/test/data` no key (404).

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