Built a one-file OpenRouter client — figured I'd open-source it.
We deal with a lot of dynamic structured data, where different LLM calls have different priorities — sometimes speed, sometimes latency, sometimes cost. After a year of using OpenRouter heavily in production, I ran into plenty of real-world issues — bad providers, unreliable fallbacks, weird edge cases — so I baked all of that into this. We needed strong guarantees on output and simple, reliable handling around it. Also worth mentioning: OpenAI (and by extension OpenRouter) have their own quirks when dealing with Zod-based structured outputs — plenty of edge cases there too.
The primary motivations: