Why fallback routing is core infrastructure for production AI agents

Short summary

The author argues fallback is core infrastructure, not a polish feature, after OpenAI billing issues broke multiple agent runs. Real agent systems face rate limits, spend caps, timeouts, and provider-specific quirks that require routing by failure class rather than blind retry. The post advocates per-agent policies—switching providers within model class for rate limits, moving to larger-context models for context errors, and rerouting before spend caps trigger failures.

• •Fallback is core design, not a post-launch feature for production agents
• •Route by failure class: rate limits, context errors, content policy, spend caps
• •Per-agent provider policies beat single global model switches

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