Silent cloud model updates break production RAG pipelines

This highlights the core tension in modern AI development: the convenience of cloud APIs comes at the cost of immutable infrastructure, making self-hosting the only true path to reliability.

• –Relying on non-versioned cloud endpoints turns prompt engineering into a fragile house of cards that can collapse without warning
• –Cloud providers routinely fail to guarantee strict immutability, even on nominally versioned endpoints that are eventually deprecated
• –Automated evals are no longer optional for production RAG systems; they are required to detect behavioral shifts immediately
• –The community consensus heavily favors self-hosting via vLLM or Ollama to maintain total control over the execution environment