Here's a line of code that's quietly running in production at a surprising number of companies:
const response = await openai.chat.completions.create({ model: "gpt-4o", messages });
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It looks harmless. It's also why your AI bill is whatever it is this month, why your app goes down the moment OpenAI has a bad afternoon, and why the same question typed by ten thousand users costs you ten thousand inference calls. That one line hardcodes a vendor, a model, a pricing tier, and a single point of failure all at once.
