Briefle words · Code & architecture
Breaking change
A change that makes existing callers or clients fail, such as removing or renaming a field, changing its units or adding a required parameter.
Say it to an AI
Renaming weight (kg) to weightGrams is a breaking change, so ship it under /v2 using URL-based API versioning and keep /v1 byte-for-byte unchanged. Add a v2 shipment serializer, and note the v1 deprecation date in the changelog.
How an expert would brief the stronger version of “Shipment API change”.
See it
Try it as a puzzle →A pull request changes a field in a logistics API that dozens of customer integrations call.
Why: B removes 'weight' (kilograms) and adds 'weightGrams' in the same response every client already uses.
Related words
Room 5 · APIs & data
Learn “Breaking change” in a five-minute lesson