Cohere Production Checklist Skill

Cohere Production Checklist

Overview

Complete go-live checklist for deploying Cohere API v2 integrations to production with safety gates, health checks, and rollback procedures.

Prerequisites

Staging environment tested and verified
Production API key (not trial) from dashboard.cohere.com
Deployment pipeline configured
Monitoring and alerting ready

Checklist

API & Authentication

[ ] Using production API key (not trial — trial is rate-limited to 20 calls/min)
[ ] CO_API_KEY stored in secret manager (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager)
[ ] Key rotation procedure documented and tested
[ ] Billing alerts configured at dashboard.cohere.com
[ ] Using API v2 endpoints (CohereClientV2, not CohereClient)

Code Quality

[ ] All API calls specify model parameter explicitly
[ ] embeddingTypes set for all Embed calls (required for v3+)
[ ] inputType set for all Embed calls (required for v3+)
[ ] Error handling catches CohereError and CohereTimeoutError
[ ] Retry logic with exponential backoff for 429 and 5xx
[ ] No hardcoded API keys in source code
[ ] Request/response logging excludes API keys and PII

Model Selection

[ ] Correct model IDs used (not deprecated names):

| Use Case | Recommended Model | Fallback | |----------|------------------|----------| | Chat/generation | command-a-03-2025 | command-r-plus-08-2024 | | Lightweight chat | command-r7b-12-2024 | command-r-08-2024 | | Embeddings | embed-v4.0 | embed-english-v3.0 | | Reranking | rerank-v3.5 | rerank-english-v3.0 |

Performance

[ ] Embed calls batched (up to 96 texts per request)
[ ] Rerank calls limited to 1000 documents per request
[ ] Streaming enabled for user-facing chat (chatStream)
[ ] Connection pooling / keep-alive configured
[ ] Response caching for repeated embed/rerank queries
[ ] maxTokens set to prevent runaway generation costs

Health Check Endpoint

// /api/health
import { CohereClientV2, CohereError } from 'cohere-ai';

const cohere = new CohereClientV2();

export async function GET() {
  const start = Date.now();
  let cohereStatus: 'healthy' | 'degraded' | 'down' = 'down';

  try {
    // Cheapest possible health check — minimal chat
    await cohere.chat({
      model: 'command-r7b-12-2024',
      messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'ping' }],
      maxTokens: 1,
    });
    cohereStatus = 'healthy';
  } catch (err) {
    if (err instanceof CohereError && err.statusCode === 429) {
      cohereStatus = 'degraded'; // Rate limited but reachable
    }
  }

  return Response.json({
    status: cohereStatus === 'healthy' ? 'ok' : 'degraded',
    cohere: {
      status: cohereStatus,
      latencyMs: Date.now() - start,
    },
    timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
  });
}

Circuit Breaker

class CohereCircuitBreaker {
  private failures = 0;
  private lastFailure = 0;
  private state: 'closed' | 'open' | 'half-open' = 'closed';

  constructor(
    private threshold = 5,
    private resetMs = 60_000
  ) {}

  async call<T>(fn: () => Promise<T>, fallback?: () => T): Promise<T> {
    if (this.state === 'open') {
      if (Date.now() - this.lastFailure > this.resetMs) {
        this.state = 'half-open';
      } else if (fallback) {
        return fallback();
      } else {
        throw new Error('Cohere circuit breaker is open');
      }
    }

    try {
      const result = await fn();
      this.failures = 0;
      this.state = 'closed';
      return result;
    } catch (err) {
      this.failures++;
      this.lastFailure = Date.now();

      if (this.failures >= this.threshold) {
        this.state = 'open';
        console.error(`Cohere circuit breaker OPEN after ${this.failures} failures`);
      }
      throw err;
    }
  }
}

const breaker = new CohereCircuitBreaker();

Gradual Rollout

# Pre-flight
curl -sf https://staging.example.com/api/health | jq '.cohere'
curl -s https://status.cohere.com/api/v2/status.json | jq '.status'

# Deploy with canary (10% traffic)
kubectl apply -f k8s/production.yaml
kubectl rollout pause deployment/app

# Monitor for 10 minutes: error rate, latency, 429s
# Check: No increase in CohereError rate
# Check: P95 latency < 5s for chat, < 500ms for embed/rerank

# Proceed to 100%
kubectl rollout resume deployment/app
kubectl rollout status deployment/app

Monitoring Alerts

| Alert | Condition | Severity | |-------|-----------|----------| | Cohere unreachable | Health check fails 3x | P1 | | High error rate | 5xx > 5% of requests/5min | P1 | | Rate limited | 429 > 10/min | P2 | | High latency | Chat P95 > 10s | P2 | | Auth failure | Any 401 response | P1 | | Budget exceeded | Daily token cost > threshold | P2 |

Rollback

# Immediate rollback
kubectl rollout undo deployment/app
kubectl rollout status deployment/app

# Verify rollback
curl -sf https://api.example.com/api/health | jq '.cohere'

Output

Production-ready Cohere integration with health checks
Circuit breaker preventing cascade failures
Monitoring alerts for Cohere-specific error conditions
Documented rollback procedure

Resources

Next Steps

For version upgrades, see cohere-upgrade-migration.

Agent Skills: Cohere Production Checklist

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