# Are OpenTelemetry's GenAI semantic conventions stable enough to build on?

No, not yet. Every `gen_ai.*` attribute, span, and metric in OpenTelemetry's GenAI semantic conventions still carries the project's "development" stability marker, one step short of the "stable" label OpenTelemetry uses once a convention is safe to build production tooling against. The repository has shipped no tagged release, and the spec itself still lists a placeholder where a finished schema URL would go.

That matters most for anyone parsing these fields downstream, not just emitting them. A stable attribute name is a contract: OpenTelemetry won't restructure it without a deprecation path. A development attribute has no such guarantee, and one already moved, indexed fields like `gen_ai.prompt.0.content` got replaced by a structured `gen_ai.input.messages`. A parser written against the old shape stops matching with no error to catch it. Emit the conventions, they're still the closest thing to a standard, just don't assume today's field names survive the next spec revision, and re-check them before every OpenTelemetry upgrade.

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Sources:
- OpenTelemetry semantic-conventions-genai repository: https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions-genai (fetched 2026-09-04)

Source: https://tessary.ai/answers/instrumentation/are-genai-semantic-conventions-stable-enough-to-build-on
More on Instrumentation: https://tessary.ai/answers/instrumentation
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