The Bottleneck Was Never the Model — It's the Routing Layer

In May 2026, a widely-discussed essay on Hacker News argued that "the bottleneck was never the code" — AI code generation has solved the coding bottleneck, but the real bottlenecks remain in specification, design, review, and deployment. It resonated with thousands of developers. But there's another bottleneck nobody's talking about enough: the routing layer between your application and the LLM providers . If you're building anything beyond a ChatGPT wrapper, you already know: models fail, rate