Model providers and prompt formats will change. The teams that stay calm are those that treat AI calls as adapters behind stable domain interfaces.
Keep business rules in your application language. Pass structured context into the adapter and receive structured results back, with explicit error types for timeouts, policy blocks, and low-confidence outcomes.
Separate retrieval indexing jobs from request-time inference when possible. Mixing them creates deployments that are hard to reason about and harder to roll back.
Add contract tests around the adapter. Even lightweight fixtures that assert schema and timeout behavior prevent silent drift when someone upgrades an SDK.