Building on Sand

Unreliable dependencies, beta APIs, deprecated models, preview-tier services — building on any of them means your project can stop working without warning. A beta video-generation API changes its response format; your pipeline breaks. A model gets deprecated; your shot no longer renders. The fix is awareness: when you depend on something unstable, know it, document it, and have a fallback plan. For anything production-critical, prefer the oldest stable version of the tool that does what you need.

See also: ../../practical/ on reproducibility — how to keep a project working six months from now.