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Maintenance · Version 1.0.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

API Version Sunset Advisor

Reduce change risk for usage evidence and brownout scheduling with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 4 documented failure modes 4 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Retires old API versions with usage evidence, brownouts, and a communication plan that reaches integrators.

₹99 one-time

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What this skill helps you do

  • Usage evidence
  • Brownout scheduling
  • Migration support

How API Version Sunset Advisor works

You provide

Current versions, changelogs, support dates, and coverage

It inspects

Breaking changes and transitive pins behind usage evidence

It decides

A brownout scheduling sequence taking one major at a time

You verify

Suite green between increments with rollback proven

What it checks first

API Version Sunset Advisor retires old API versions with usage evidence, brownouts, and a communication plan that reaches integrators. Use it when the work involves Usage evidence, Brownout scheduling, Migration support.

  1. Whether the current version is still supported, and the date support actually ends.
  2. How many major versions separate current from target, since each carries its own breaking changes.
  3. Whether test coverage is sufficient to detect a behavioral regression from the upgrade.
  4. Transitive dependencies that constrain the upgrade regardless of direct requirements.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • Skipping intermediate majors so several sets of breaking changes land together, unattributable.
  • A deprecation warning ignored until the removal makes the upgrade a project.
  • A transitive dependency pinning an old version, silently blocking the direct upgrade.
  • An upgrade completed without a rollback path because a data format changed.

Answers it will reject

  • Upgrading everything at once to reduce disruption, which maximizes debugging cost.
  • Treating a green build as sufficient evidence when coverage of the changed behavior is thin.
  • Deferring an end-of-life migration until support has already lapsed.

Decision rules it applies

  • Upgrade one major at a time with the suite green between each step.
  • Resolve deprecation warnings from version N before starting N+1; they are the removal list.
  • Plan end-of-life migrations against the support date, not against convenience.

Evidence it asks for

  • Inventory direct and transitive versions against their support timelines.
  • Run the suite between each increment and record which behavior changed.
  • Verify rollback by deploying the previous version against the upgraded data.

The method inside

  1. Map the artifact, actors, boundaries, and invariants relevant to usage evidence.
  2. Trace concrete failure or abuse paths for brownout scheduling; do not report checklist items without a mechanism.
  3. Prioritize migration support findings by impact, likelihood, confidence, and cost of correction.
  4. Recommend the smallest defensible change, then define how an independent reviewer can verify it.

Deliverables

  • Usage evidence assessment
  • Brownout scheduling decision and action plan
  • Migration support verification checklist

Evidence requirements

  • Current and target versions
  • Dependency graph and changelogs
  • Tests, compatibility constraints, and rollout environment

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

We still run three API versions and maintaining them is slowing every change. How do we retire v1?

Expected output

Retire on evidence rather than a date: instrument usage per client, contact the specific integrators still calling, and run scheduled brownouts of increasing duration so the deadline is experienced rather than announced...

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Usage evidence: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Brownout scheduling: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Migration support: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Blindly upgrading across multiple major versions
  • Assuming semantic versioning guarantees compatibility

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot custom agents
  • Claude Agent Skills / SKILL.md
  • Any instruction-following chat model

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.