Fix missing OpenAI embeddings key handling

[yjm7vj]

Description

Fixes #1004

Removes the NOTAKEY fallback for OPENAI_EMBEDDINGS_KEY in the OpenAI embeddings client setup.

Previously, when OPENAI_EMBEDDINGS_KEY was missing, the app initialized the OpenAI client with the placeholder value NOTAKEY, causing inference search to fail later with a generic OpenAI/auth error. This change fails early with a clear missing environment variable error, making the root cause easier to diagnose in logs.

Checklist

• You've included unit or integration tests for your change, where applicable.
  • Not applicable; this is an environment variable guard/config handling change.
• You've included inline docs for your change, where applicable.
  • Not applicable; the thrown error message documents the required env var.
• Any components that you've modified are accessible.
  • Not applicable; no UI components were modified.
• You've used conventional commits where appropriate

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
internal-dashboard	Ready	Preview, Comment	Jul 7, 2026 7:33pm
nightcrawler	Ready	Preview, Comment	Jul 7, 2026 7:33pm

[rcjasub]

Requesting changes — the fix moves the missing-key check to module load time instead of scoping it to where the key is actually used, which introduces a regression.

packages/db/src/utils/get-embedding.ts now throws as soon as the module is imported, not when getEmbedding() is called. queries.ts statically imports getEmbedding, and its getDefaultDropdownItems() (lines 38–77) never calls it — it only queries IMPs/seed products directly. So the nav-bar's default (empty-query) search dropdown now hard-crashes whenever OPENAI_EMBEDDINGS_KEY is missing, even though that path never touched embeddings before. It also bypasses the graceful-degradation try/catch already in queries.ts/search.ts, since those only wrap runtime calls, not module evaluation.

Suggestion: move the check inside getEmbedding() (or lazily construct the client on first call), consistent with how connection.ts handles DATABASE_URL — checked lazily, at use time, not at import.

Otherwise the fix is correct and the error message is clear for #1004 — just needs to be scoped narrower before merging. Let me know how that goes.