Treat AI Models as Dependencies, Not Products, to Avoid Integration Failures

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A software team recently lost three days of work after switching LLM providers over a weekend, only to discover a schema mismatch where the new provider returned responses in a different format than the old one. No tests had been written against the response contract, causing every prompt template in the codebase to return empty strings. The author argues that the real product teams ship is the contract between their app and the model, not the model itself, and that it should be defined before a model is even chosen. To enforce this, the author builds a lightweight API gateway that accepts a fixed request shape, calls a configurable provider, and always returns a fixed response shape, with model names stored as environment variables. Running a contract test suite against this gateway in CI can prevent the kind of costly provider-swap failures that stem from undocumented response format assumptions.

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