Last month, my side project hit a wall. The AI summarization API I depended on returned a 503 error for three hours. My app – a simple tool that translates meeting transcripts into action items – stopped working entirely. Users noticed. I got emails. It was embarrassing.
I had built everything around a single provider. One point of failure. Classic mistake.
The Problem
I was using a popular AI API to generate summaries. It worked beautifully... until it didn't. The first time it happened, I panicked and scrambled to find an alternative. I ended up rewriting chunks of code while the outage continued. Not fun.
What I needed was a system that could gracefully degrade – try a primary model, and if that fails, automatically switch to a secondary one. Ideally without losing context or having to restart the process.
