Migrations & Rollouts

Migrations & Rollouts at Staff Scope

The four migrations that actually scare a production AI team — swapping providers, decomposing a monolith into an agent, upgrading a model version, and hot-swapping a component — each run under one safe pattern: shadow, canary, ramp, rollback-ready.

Classic migrations have a comforting property: you can diff the old and new outputs byte-for-byte and prove they match. AI migrations don’t. Swap Sonnet 4.5 for Sonnet 5 and the same prompt returns a different string that may be just as correct, subtly worse, or confidently wrong — and the API returns 200 either way. So “is the migration safe?” is never a byte-equality question; it’s an eval-scoring question. This section is four playbooks for the migrations you will actually be asked to run, each with the trigger, the risk, a step-by-step rollout, how you verify safety, and the rollback plan.