Topic
Practice of managing changes to an API's interface over time—via version numbers, dated releases, or parallel paths—so updates don't break existing clients.
LinkedIn charges nothing per API call, but posting to a company page needs Community Management API approval and starts at 500 calls a day per app. A dev.to write-up of LinkedIn's docs says teams should also budget for yearly version and connection renewals.
Reality
Meta stops returning three Delivery Estimate fields on all Marketing API versions, pinned and unversioned, on October 27. The endpoint keeps answering 200, so forecasting code reads nulls and raises no error.
Reality
One team's two MCP servers, in Hiberden and Easy2257, share a protocol but take their auth, distribution and update rules from where each one runs. Settle that choice before designing tools, because it decides whether a shipped tool signature can ever change.
Reality
A reproducible two-commit diff counted eight operations removed from GitHub's OpenAPI spec in six months, ten newly flagged across OpenAI's /videos surface in ten weeks, and nothing removed or flagged at Stripe.
Reality
The endpoint keeps returning 200 with valid JSON, so release tooling reads an absent field and carries on. Pinning the version header defers that work rather than removing it, and the deferral has a date on it.
Reality
A dev.to walkthrough moves the permission check out of the callback and clamps per_page at 100. The version string in the namespace is the cheap part that costs most later.
Reality