When Your AI API Goes Down: A Real-World Fallback Strategy

Two months ago, I was staring at a 503 error from an AI API provider while my users were mid-conversation with my app. The session was dead, the logs were full of red, and my phone was buzzing with angry user messages. That’s when I learned the hard way: depending on a single AI API is like building a house on one stilt. I’ve been building AI-powered features for a while—chatbots, summarization, content generation. Like many of us, I started with OpenAI’s API. It’s reliable most of the time, an...