[bbss]

The downside with “automagically” trying to handle idempotency is users may not be aware of it and retries may happen across different processes (maybe they are running their application on k8s with multiple pods), which doesn’t work with stripes default behaviour.

IMO the idempotency key should be required to be set and make the user aware that they need to handle retries properly.

[brandur]

You might find differing philosophies depending on where you look, but a recurring theme you'll find with Stripe's is that they try to make it as easy as possible to get an integration up and running. When you're building out a payment integration, you're already awash in non-trivial concepts that are probably new and novel to you, so things that can be abstracted away for the time being to make things easier generally are.

In the situation you describe, I think it would make more sense to just retry the call a couple times from the same pod so you don't have the sizable overhead of discarding it and creating a new one for every failure, in which case the automatic keys would work fine. And if there's a really good reason they're not, setting the keys manually is very easy. At some point if you're far enough off the beaten path, you have to expect to read some docs.