Fifteen days of silence and the model is gone
Two providers published the terms on which they withdraw something you build on. One of them ends access after a fortnight of not using it.
How we Build
The token changed shape after five months of notice addressed to nobody
GitHub has finished switching the format of the tokens its apps authenticate with. A rollout that began on 27 April closed on 2 October. Every token minted now runs to about 520 characters where the old ones were 40. Permissions and expiry are untouched. What changed is the shape. The changelog then lists where an old assumption about that shape tends to sit: a check insisting on forty characters, a fixed-width database column, a truncating proxy, a redaction rule for the old pattern.
We ask a team to keep a list of what it builds and what that work leans on. Against each entry it records whether the thing leaned on has said it will warn you before it breaks.
Every skill and every agent the team builds is entered in a catalogue with its owner, version and status, declaring what it depends on and whether each dependency has promised notice before a breaking change.
GitHub warned for five months. It shipped a header you could test against and a dated end. The notice went to a changelog. Nobody was written to. So the list is the only thing that could have received it. Whoever was not keeping one meets this as a failed call rather than a diary entry.
How we Assure
A model you call once a quarter can be withdrawn in a fortnight
Amazon has published the lifecycle for every model launched on Bedrock since 7 September. A model is Active, Legacy or End-of-Life. Code can read which by checking a field. Legacy runs six months on most models and 45 days on some. The clause that does the damage is quieter than either. Once Legacy starts, an existing customer may lose access after fifteen days of inactivity. Past the end date the model leaves every region and calls fail, and the only way through is a private arrangement with the provider.
We tell a client that anything borrowed from outside the firm needs a written answer to one question. What happens on the day it stops?
Everything the team depends on from outside the firm has a stated exit.
Here the answer is already written, and the counterparty wrote it, which makes the field fillable from the source rather than estimated. That is the useful half. The other half is that six months is the headline and not the number. Write six months against a model you call quarterly, or seasonally, or only when the primary fails. The exit then arrives in a fortnight of silence.