AI Letters #14 · Provider Switching

Switching Cost Dashboard

Lines changed per switch, provider coverage, and cumulative cost as your codebase grows. All data from LLM Showdown #5.

1
SynapseKit lines per switch
3
LangChain/LlamaIndex per switch
14
SynapseKit built-in providers
1
LangChain/LI built-in (OpenAI only)
Lines changed per provider switch (vs OpenAI baseline)
Cumulative changes — 5 switches, N LLM files in codebase
Switching cost matrix — all 5 providers tested
Provider Model tested SynapseKit LangChain LlamaIndex
OpenAI gpt-4o-mini baseline baseline baseline
Groq llama-3.1-8b-instant 1 3 3
Anthropic claude-3-haiku-20240307 1 3 3
Mistral mistral-small-latest 1 3 3
Ollama (local) llama3 1 3 3
"3 changes" = pip install new package + update import + update constructor class name. All switches tested in the same RAG pipeline. Reproducible: LLM Showdown #5
Provider coverage — built-in vs requires install
SynapseKit
14
providers built-in · 0 extra installs
OpenAI
Anthropic
Groq
Mistral
Ollama
Cohere · Together AI · Fireworks
+ 6 more
LangChain
1
built-in (OpenAI) · 13 require install
OpenAI (core)
langchain-anthropic
langchain-groq
langchain-mistralai
langchain-ollama
+ 9 more separate packages
LlamaIndex
1
built-in (OpenAI) · 13 require install
OpenAI (core)
llama-index-llms-anthropic
llama-index-llms-groq
llama-index-llms-mistral
llama-index-llms-ollama
+ 9 more separate packages
www.engineersofai.com · AI Letters #14