The Orchestration-Ownership Rule
Use vendor APIs for data, vendor models for inference, but own the orchestration. When the beta gets deprecated, you ship a config change, not a re-architecture.
Don't build your core pipeline on someone else's beta feature. If your generation flow depends on Perplexity Skills or any vendor's beta orchestration layer, that vendor controls your release cadence, your reliability, and your unit economics.
The rule: use vendor APIs for data, vendor models for inference, but own the orchestration. LangGraph, a custom state machine, or even FastAPI with explicit transitions — anything you wrote and can change without permission.
The cost is a few extra weeks of engineering. The payoff is that when the vendor deprecates the beta, you ship a config change, not a re-architecture. This is the same lesson as building on platform APIs in the 2010s, just with a new generation of platforms.