Series: redb ecosystem (LLM, part 2)
A few days ago I announced redb.Route.Llm — the 24th transport in redb.Route, where calling an LLM is .To("llm://claude") and an agent tool is just a route with .AsLlmTool("shell") on it. The whole pitch was: stop bolting an "AI framework" onto an integration framework that already has retry, throttle, breaker, audit, observability. Plug the LLM in as one more endpoint, get those primitives for free.
I closed that announcement with a deliberately uncomfortable section called the "honest skip-list" — features I hadn't shipped yet: streaming end-to-end, tool cache, RAG knowledge store, async batch + callback consumer, eval-run store, sliding-window memory, sandboxed tool execution. I'd rather under-promise in writing than over-promise in screenshots.
Most of that list is shipped. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about the thing I didn't quite see at announcement time: shipping the skip-list turned the whole thing into something different from a chat library. It turns out that once you put an LLM into an ESB and start adding the boring enterprise plumbing, the result isn't "a chat framework with extras". It's a runway from a 6-line demo to a multi-tenant, audited, budgeted, human-in-the-loop agent platform — with no rewrite in the middle.
