pi gates publishes on a catalog compatibility check after the kimi-coding protocol switch broke pi 1.2.0

Earendil member davidbrai merged pull request #11007 into pi on October 15, 2026, minutes after v1.3.0 was published — the change sits on main past that release. It addresses a failure mode the catalog distribution model makes structural: pi.dev serves each published model catalog to every released pi at or above MINIMUM_PI_VERSION, right away, so if a catalog entry needs code those releases do not have, they break.

That is what happened when kimi-coding moved to the openai-completions API: pi 1.2.0 kept sending Anthropic requests to the new URL and got 404s. The release notes already carried the defensive half for v1.3.0 — the Nix flake fix that refreshes the model catalog pin from the newest published catalog when a provider switches APIs, with releases pinning the newest catalog and building with it before tagging (#10985). #11007 adds the compile-time counterpart on the publish path itself.

The check runs before publishing and on pull requests touching packages/ai: it compiles the latest release’s pi-ai against its built-in models with the new catalog laid on top, and a model using an API its provider does not implement becomes a type error that blocks the publish. If the incompatibility is intended, MINIMUM_PI_VERSION is bumped in the same commit. The constant moves to scripts/model-catalog-minimum-version.mjs, so the check and the publish script share it.

The merge postdates the v1.3.0 tag, so it waits for the next release; the #11007 diff on GitHub shows the full change across its five files.