I Put One LLM Gateway in Front of Six AI Agents: Fallbacks, Budgets and 5 Failures

One provider hiccup and my whole fleet of AI agents stopped answering. Here is the single gateway, the fallback rules and the budget guardrails I built so that never happens again, plus the five ways it still broke on me.

EDITOR NOTE (delete after your own rewrite): drafted with AI assistance - Medium requires disclosure unless you substantially rewrite it.

I run six AI agents at home: a chief-of-staff agent, a video producer, a researcher, an infrastructure agent and two chat helpers. For a long time each one talked straight to whatever provider I had wired in that week. It worked until a rate limit, an expired login or a deleted model name quietly turned a scheduled job into a nightly failure.

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