12 Hard Questions to Ask Before Routing Production Traffic Through a Third-Party LLM

A developer at multi-model gateway Daoxe has published a practical checklist for engineers evaluating third-party LLM endpoints before sending production traffic through them. The guide focuses on questions that require real vendor effort to answer, covering areas such as wire protocol implementation, model ID accuracy, supply chain transparency, and usage data exports. The author notes that vague marketing claims like 'fast, reliable, and secure' are unverifiable, and recommends hands-on tests — such as sending malformed model IDs or omitting required parameters — to expose gaps between a vendor's claims and actual behavior. Monitoring advice includes running independent one-token completion probes every five minutes to build your own latency and availability records. Notably, the author openly acknowledges that Daoxe itself fails two items on the checklist, framing the exercise as a genuine evaluation tool rather than a self-promotional spec sheet.