versioning-and-evolution

versioning-and-evolution is a skill for Claude Code from oborchers/fractional-cto. It costs 72 tokens per session (2,952 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to changing an API over time while keeping existing client programs working. API versioning means offering a controlled way to introduce incompatible changes and manage their retirement.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when choosing URL or header versioning, planning dated versions, adding deprecation notices, or setting sunset headers.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk that renaming fields, removing endpoints, or changing data types will unexpectedly break users' integrations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the api-design-principles plugin — 13 skills, 1 command, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it when choosing URL or header versioning, planning dated versions, adding deprecation notices, or setting sunset headers.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/versioning-and-evolution
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add oborchers/fractional-cto --skill versioning-and-evolution
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oborchers/fractional-cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install api-design-principles, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 1 command, 1 agent.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for versioning-and-evolution

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/versioning-and-evolution/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/versioning-and-evolution)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/versioning-and-evolution"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/versioning-and-evolution/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for versioning-and-evolution

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/versioning-and-evolution"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/versioning-and-evolution.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,952 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 110
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00072 $0.02952
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.01476
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00590
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00295

Measured 10d ago against content hash bac55a1c0aa3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

versioning-and-evolution scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

api-design-principles/skills/versioning-and-evolution/SKILL.md · 200 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 200 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ship V1 and Never Break It

Your API version is a promise. The moment a consumer writes code against your endpoint, you have entered a contract. Breaking that contract -- renaming a field, removing an endpoint, changing a type -- destroys trust and costs integration partners real engineering time. The best APIs treat backward compatibility as non-negotiable and version changes as a carefully managed migration, not a surprise.

Stripe has kept /v1/ stable since 2012. Over a decade, zero URL-level version bumps. They ship breaking changes behind dated version headers, and every account stays pinned to the version it was created with. This is the gold standard. Your API should aspire to the same discipline.

Versioning Strategies

Four strategies exist in production. Each has real tradeoffs.

Strategy Mechanism Pros Cons Used By
URL path /v1/resources Explicit, visible, cacheable, trivial to route at the gateway URL changes break clients on major bumps, encourages big-bang migrations Stripe, Google, Twilio, Facebook, Spotify
Custom header Stripe-Version: 2024-11-20 or X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28 Clean URLs, per-request granularity, enables incremental migration Invisible in URLs, harder to debug and cache, must remember the header Stripe (secondary), GitHub
Query parameter ?api-version=2022-12-01 Easy to add, visible in logs Mixes versioning with resource params, easily omitted, pollutes query string Azure, AWS
Date-based header (Stripe model) Account pinned to signup date, override with Stripe-Version header Granular per-request migration, no URL changes, each change documented by date Requires version gate infrastructure internally Stripe

Default to URL path versioning. It is the most intuitive, most cacheable, and easiest to route. Every developer understands /v1/. Reserve header-based versioning for fine-grained control within a major version, following Stripe's hybrid model.

Read the full file on GitHub · 200 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 200 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A bac55a1c0aa3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

versioning-and-evolution is a skill published in the GitHub repository oborchers/fractional-cto (29 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 2,952 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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