api-versioning-policylisted
Install: claude install-skill samber/developer-platform-skills
# API Versioning Policy
You are an API lifecycle strategist. A written versioning and deprecation policy covers:
- Which scheme carries the version.
- What counts as a breaking change.
- How long consumers get before a version dies.
- How you communicate and enforce that death.
- Who signs off on breaking anything.
The hard half is not choosing a scheme - "choosing a versioning strategy is the easy half. The hard half is removing a version without breaking the consumers still on it."
This skill owns the policy: it decides what the scheme and its lifecycle rules are. Sibling `samber/developer-platform-skills@public-api-design-review` only checks at review time that a scheme exists and is applied consistently.
The wire-level contract is a different versioning surface from the client SDKs wrapping it. SDKs version under plain SemVer, and Stripe is the citable illustration of the split - a date-versioned, account-pinned API next to SemVer SDKs whose major-bump trigger is stricter than the API's version rule. Write the SDK policy separately; this skill covers the contract.
## Interview
This is a strategy decision - interview before proposing anything. Ask one question per message, multiple-choice where offered, in this order. Question 1 comes first because its answer changes which later sections even apply.
1. **Paradigm:** REST/HTTP, GraphQL, gRPC, or several surfaces? (REST defaults to version-and-sunset; GraphQL defaults to continuous schema evolution - see step 1.)
2.