Comparison
Graceful degradationvsProgressive enhancement
Graceful degradation
the provider went down and users got a cached answer or an honest error, because you decided that in design rather than at 3am.
A designed answer to 'the model is down or over budget': cached responses, a smaller model, a non-AI code path, or an honest error. Decided in design, not improvised mid-incident.
Full entry →Progressive enhancement
the form still submits when the JavaScript fails to load, because it was a real form pointing at a real endpoint.
Building the working baseline in HTML and treating scripting as an improvement on top rather than a requirement. It costs discipline — the server needs a non-JavaScript path for anything important — and buys resilience against the surprisingly common case of a bundle that never arrives. Framework conventions built around forms and links have quietly made this the default again after a decade of it not being.
Full entry →