The smartest 2026 architecture isn't the biggest model — it's sending each task to the cheapest one that does it well. A gateway makes that swappable, observable, and resilient.
⚡Your provider had a bad hour, your whole app went down with it — and switching models means touching code in forty places.
LEVEL 1 — REMEMBER · the vocabulary
⚓ ANCHOR · IF YOU ALREADY KNOW
A gateway is a reverse proxy for models: one endpoint, routing rules, fallbacks, and a metrics dashboard. It's nginx for LLM calls — your code stops hardcoding a provider and starts making a routing decision at runtime.