How I stopped fighting AI API chaos with a simple proxy

I recently took on a side project that needed to tap into multiple AI models – GPT-4 for complex reasoning, Claude for creative writing, and a local Llama 2 for quick drafts. My naive plan was to just call each API directly from my Python backend. Three days later, I had a tangled mess of authentication headers, inconsistent rate limits, and error handling that looked like a love letter to try/except. I almost trashed the whole thing. If you've ever tried to build anything beyond a single-LLM d...