While building AI features that rely on real-time streaming responses, I kept running into failures that were hard to reason about once things went async.
Requests would partially stream, providers would throttle or fail mid-stream, and retry logic ended up scattered across background jobs, webhooks, and request handlers.
I built ModelRiver as a thin API layer that sits between an app and AI providers and centralizes streaming, retries, failover, and request-level debugging in one place.
It’s early and opinionated, and there are tradeoffs. Happy to answer technical questions or hear how others are handling streaming reliability in production AI apps.
At what point does adding this layer become more complex than just handling streaming failures directly in the app?
If streaming behavior is still product-specific and changing fast, this adds friction. It only pays off once failure handling stabilizes and starts repeating across the system.
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Why not just handle this in the application with queues and background jobs?
Queues work well before or after a request, but they’re awkward once a response is already streaming. This layer exists mainly to handle failures during a stream without spreading that logic across handlers, workers, and client code.
While building AI features that rely on real-time streaming responses, I kept running into failures that were hard to reason about once things went async.
Requests would partially stream, providers would throttle or fail mid-stream, and retry logic ended up scattered across background jobs, webhooks, and request handlers.
I built ModelRiver as a thin API layer that sits between an app and AI providers and centralizes streaming, retries, failover, and request-level debugging in one place.
It’s early and opinionated, and there are tradeoffs. Happy to answer technical questions or hear how others are handling streaming reliability in production AI apps.
At what point does adding this layer become more complex than just handling streaming failures directly in the app?
If streaming behavior is still product-specific and changing fast, this adds friction. It only pays off once failure handling stabilizes and starts repeating across the system.
Why not just handle this in the application with queues and background jobs?
Queues work well before or after a request, but they’re awkward once a response is already streaming. This layer exists mainly to handle failures during a stream without spreading that logic across handlers, workers, and client code.
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