Developer Advocates Structured Smoke Tests Before Switching LLM Providers

A software developer has outlined why a single successful prompt is insufficient when evaluating a new large language model provider for production use. The author argues that basic happy-path requests fail to reveal how a provider behaves during timeouts, rate limiting, streaming interruptions, or tool call retries. To address this, they now run a structured smoke test covering error classification, streaming metadata, retry safety, usage data, and request ID availability. The goal is not to benchmark providers against each other but to verify that an application can correctly interpret and handle whatever the provider returns. The approach prioritizes predictable failure modes over performance metrics, aiming to prevent production incidents during provider migrations.