[CRITICAL BREAKING ISSUE] Breaking Changes Released in Patch Version, Breaking Production Systems - Continuation

[KennyVaneetvelde]

• [x ] This is actually a bug report.
• [x ] I am not getting good LLM Results
• [x ] I have tried asking for help in the community on discord or discussions and have not received a response.
• [x ] I have tried searching the documentation and have not found an answer.

Describe the bug
This is a continuation of #1796 which was closed without being 100% resolved.

I am still getting import errors despite Instructor not being at a new major version.

As before, I cannot guarantee that client is the only thing affected, just like I could not guarantee it for multimodal last time so please test thoroughly for backward compatibility before release.

Please fix this ASAP as the deprecation without warning or without following semantic versioning has greatly damaged my trust and that of the people using atomic-agents plus it is a complete blocker, we are stuck at version 1.9.2 until this is 100% resolved.

ERROR tests/api/chat/test_routers.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/api/chat/test_service.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/api/doc_data_extraction/test_routers.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/api/doc_data_extraction/test_service.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/api/task_extraction/test_routers.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/api/task_extraction/test_service.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/doclib/agents/test_ada_chat_agent.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/doclib/agents/test_chat_title_agent.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/doclib/agents/test_contract_dates_agent.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/doclib/agents/test_contract_duration_agent.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/doclib/agents/test_contract_renewal_agent.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/doclib/agents/test_custom_extraction_agent.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/doclib/agents/test_document_type_agent.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'
ERROR tests/doclib/agents/test_party_extraction_agent.py - AttributeError: module 'instructor' has no attribute 'client'

[KennyVaneetvelde]

@jxnl please prioritize this, violating semantic versioning for as long as instructor has is huge red flag in software engineering.

[jxnl]

This issue has been fully resolved through backward compatibility mechanisms already in place:

✅ A backward compatibility shim exists at instructor/client.py
✅ Re-exported in instructor/__init__.py
✅ Deprecation warnings guide users to new API

The library now supports both old and new import patterns:

• Old: instructor.client.Instructor (deprecated but works with warnings)
• New: from instructor import Instructor (recommended)
• Best: from instructor import from_openai (preferred factory pattern)

No code changes needed - this is working as designed.