A few months ago, I was deep into building a chatbot that needed to summarize user conversations. I started with OpenAI's API—because, let's be honest, that's the default for most of us. Everything worked fine until my team decided we wanted to support other models for cost reasons and latency. Suddenly, I had to rewrite half my codebase to handle different API formats, authentication methods, and streaming behaviors.
I thought, "There has to be a better way." So I built a generic AI client that abstracts away the provider-specific details. In this article, I'll walk you through the approach that saved me weeks of maintenance—and how you can do the same.
The problem: API lock-in
When I first started, my code looked like this:
import openai
