migration

Model prices do rise. Measure the margin hit, evaluate alternatives now, route only the tasks that need the expensive tier, and treat model price as a supplier term you negotiate and hedge.

Leaderboards move every few weeks and every team feels the pull. The interviewer is checking whether you have a repeatable switching process or just enthusiasm.

Deprecations are where platforms earn or lose developer trust. The interviewer wants a timeline, a recommended replacement with evidence, migration tooling, and special handling for customers who cannot move easily.

Developer trust in an API rests on stability. The interviewer wants versioning, a long overlap, migration help and measurement, with the breaking change treated as a cost to minimise.

Customers running fine-tuned models in production depend on the base model staying alive. Stage the wind-down, keep inference running until the base retires and give each segment a path forward.

A prototype became something people depend on, on a platform with a shutdown date. Triage it, export the prompts and configuration now, name an owner, and rebuild only if usage justifies it.