Fifteen Lines of Proxy: Why SDKs Break Your CI Build and How to Fix It

Next.js executes all top-level module code during the build process, not just at runtime. Many popular SDKs (Stripe, Twilio, OpenAI, etc.) validate credentials in their constructors, following the fail-fast principle. When these two design choices collide in CI environments without complete environment variables, builds fail—but a simple Proxy pattern can prevent this.