Why I Stopped Relying on a Single AI Provider (and Built a Fallback System)

It started as a typical side project: a real-time chatbot for a community forum. I figured I'd just throw OpenAI's API at it and be done. Simple, right? Wrong. About three weeks into development, I got that dreaded 5xx error during a peak hour. My entire chatbot went dark. Users were annoyed, and I was scrambling. That was the day I realized I couldn't trust a single provider for anything production-ish. Here's how I built a fallback system that saved my weekends. The Problem: Single...