I’d spotted it a few weeks earlier. Colleagues had a dashboard open — 40+ providers, fallback chains, something I hadn’t seen before. Filed it away as interesting. Didn’t ask.
Then the subscription cap hit again.
A week later: 1am. Deploy waiting. OpenCode Go had hit its monthly cap. Staring at a rate-limit error.
The fallback providers existed. I’d been treating them like a joke.
When you hit your paid limit three weeks in, having fallback providers isn’t optional. It’s the difference between shipping and waiting for the reset date.
That night I went back. Read it again, slower. The 40+ providers stopped looking like noise. They started looking like redundancy.
I forked it that weekend. And then I couldn’t stop.
The router became what the failures demanded.
#AI #OpenSource #DevOps
Full story on Medium → https://alvian.medium.com/i-built-my-own-ai-routing-layer