If production can still reach the model endpoint you used while drafting, you did not cut over. A green deploy does not ...

If production can still reach the model endpoint you used while drafting, you did not cut over. A green deploy does not prove that. It only proves the process started.Treat the inference path as a promotion surface. Pin the base URL, the model identity, the timeout, and the fallback. If any of those still point at a lab or shared drafting host, fail the gate. Do not “try prod first and fall back to the sandbox.” That pattern turns an outage into a data leak.This is not a vibe-coding essay. It is a copy-paste checklist plus a small policy checker you can run in CI. Use it when an AI feature is about to leave the branch. The failure you are actually shippingYou added a chat box, a summarizer, or a “explain this diff” button. During development the client pointed at whatever answered quickly. That is normal. It is also how lab hosts become silent production dependencies.The bug is not “we used a model.” The bug is an unnamed path. Someone pasted a base URL into a helper. A generated clien...