Build for Change

Designing for change you can't predict.

What this chapter covers

The AI landscape will keep moving. The teams that thrive are the ones whose systems can absorb change without a rewrite. This chapter is about architecture patterns that make change cheap: clean seams, replaceable components, and explicit contracts.

Key takeaways

The seams that matter most: model, retrieval, tool, and evaluation
Contract design for components you expect to swap
How to keep prompts and policies out of application code
Test strategies that survive a model upgrade
A migration story: replacing a core model with a two-week runway

Why it matters

Change is not a threat if your architecture assumed it from the start.

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The Context Advantage is a living guide for the agentic era. Chapters 1 – 3 are free. Everything else, plus future updates, templates, and resources, is included with the lifetime edition.

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Browse the full table of contents, or explore the four pillars — Context, Control, Cost, and Choice.