I hit send. Watched the spinner. Started calculating — was I past the cap yet?
The spinner stopped. Code appeared. No error.
The request had routed through 9router’s fallback chain — paid sub, cheap API, free provider. Compressed by the headroom proxy. Under a second.
I didn’t notice the provider swap. The router handled it silently.
That’s when I realized the stack had become invisible.
Six months earlier I’d been staring at a rate-limit error at 1am. I didn’t set out to build an ADE. I just kept hitting walls and kept building ladders.
Somewhere along the way, the ladders became infrastructure.
I rebuilt the router from 200MB to 2.5MB. Built a tunnel because Warp’s cloud agents couldn’t see localhost. Migrated orchestration from a bolt-on delegate to native run_agents.
Each layer was built because the previous one had a wall I couldn’t go through.
OpenCode is an appliance. This is a chassis. One works out of the box. The other lets you swap every component.
That’s the ceiling a custom ADE buys you. Not a better subscription. A better ceiling.
#AIDevelopment #DeveloperTools #OpenSource
Full story on Medium → https://alvian.medium.com/this-is-my-ade