Chapter 7 · Practice 2 of 4
Plan a fallback for when the model is unavailable or wrong
Why it matters
Decide in advance what users see when the model cannot answer, so an outage is a plan, not a scramble.
Options include:
- a second model or provider;
- a cached or rule-based answer;
- a reduced feature;
- a clear message with a way to reach a person.
If you fall back to a different model, run it through the same eval suite first, because prompts tuned for one model often behave differently on another.
Log every fallback, so you know how often it happens and whether users are affected.