"My Product Assistant Kept Borrowing the Wrong Model. So I Gave It Its Own Routing Chain"

Short summary

A product assistant that silently switches between model sources feels unpredictable to users. The author's solution: explicit boundModelSource binding with ordered fallback chains and circuit breaker state tracking. By exposing routing state and health in the dashboard, the assistant transforms from a mysterious black box into an operational system users can inspect and debug.

• •Assistants need explicit model source binding, not implicit credential pools
• •Circuit breakers and fallback chains provide predictable behavior under source failures
• •Dashboard visibility into routing state transforms reliability from mysterious to operational

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