How I stopped fighting with AI APIs and built a clean integration layer

I remember the day I hit the wall. I was building a feature that needed to summarize user-submitted content, ask follow-up questions, and then generate a structured report. Three different AI tasks, and I was already using three different providers: OpenAI for summaries, Claude for reasoning, and a local model for sensitive data. My codebase looked like a spaghetti plate of API keys, rate-limit retries, and inconsistent error handling. Every time I wanted to add a new AI-powered feature, I ha...