I've been working on a side project that needs AI for a few different tasks: answering user questions, generating image captions, and summarizing chat threads. At first, I just picked one provider (OpenAI) and called it a day. But after a month, two things became painfully clear: first, not every model is great at every task, and second, the bill was climbing fast because I was using GPT-4 for everything.
So I did what any reasonable developer would do: I started swapping API keys by hand. I'd comment out one import and uncomment another, deploy, test, get frustrated, rinse and repeat. That worked for about a week before I decided I needed a proper solution.
The problem
My project had three distinct AI needs:
Q&A: Needs high reasoning, can be slow and expensive (GPT-4 or Claude).
