Developer Moves AI Model Calls Out of CI Into a Caching Sidecar to Save Free Quota
Repeated CI pipeline runs — triggered by pushes, retries, and scheduled jobs — were burning through free AI model quotas even when prompts had not changed. The author identified CI as a poor network client because it retries and reruns unconditionally, creating unnecessary upstream requests. To fix this, the model call was moved behind a lightweight sidecar server hosted on MonkeyCode's free tier, which caches responses by prompt hash and only contacts the upstream model when necessary. The sidecar normalises provider responses into a simple shape and returns a 502 error if the upstream reply is empty or malformed, keeping CI logic simple. The sidecar is built using only Go's standard library, avoiding extra dependencies on a free server slot.
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