So to sum it up:
- API breaks responses only for new data
- API does not provide any metadata, like versioning
- API doesn't host it's spec
- the problem isn't that the API mutates, but that it starts returning garbage for new data, but not historical.
You're out of luck. You can't prevent it. You can't foresee it, unless you know beforehand what you'll call the API with and you can pre-flight it and detect it earlier.
You seem to be a very novice programmer.
? Google that? Use a devcontainer? I mean literally a question answered thousands of times.
Setting up your dev environment. Then maybe create a few projects for you to test your package manager empirically?
Depends on what you want to do. I'm honestly not sure how to help you here? What kind of answer are you fishing for here?