My local AI gateway got much more reliable once I stopped treating Claude, Codex, Gemini, and OpenAI-style backends as interchangeable and made routing capability-aware.
CliGate, the author's gateway for Claude/Codex/Gemini, revealed API shape compatibility doesn't guarantee feature equivalence. Capability-aware translation and field degradation—not blind passthrough—prevent silent bugs where requests succeed but results diverge.
The easiest way to make an AI gateway feel flaky is to pretend every upstream model works the same way.
On paper, a lot of tools look compatible.
They all take a prompt. They all return text. Some of them even share an OpenAI-shaped API.
In practice, the differences show up exactly where users stop forgiving you:
a tool-specific field gets dropped
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