Why Single LLM Provider Dependency Is a Risk and How to Route Around It

Most AI applications today rely on a single LLM provider, meaning any outage, slowdown, or rate limit directly breaks the user experience. Infrastructure engineer Prashant spent several months investigating what happens when that sole provider fails, treating the problem as inevitable rather than hypothetical. He explored routing LLM requests across multiple providers — a redundancy strategy long used for databases and servers — to prevent single points of failure. The core challenge lies in building a middleware layer that abstracts away differing APIs, response formats, and failure modes across providers. He published his findings on DEV Community, aiming to fill a gap between vendor marketing and dense academic literature on AI infrastructure reliability.