Failover logic that retries across providers without checking capability support will silently drop attachments, charge for hallucinated responses, and hide failures behind success codes.
Summary
Document processing APIs that silently discard inputs and return confident false results are worse than errors—they corrupt production data while appearing successful. Developers building multi-model routers must validate provider capability, not just key presence.
Why it matters
Document processing APIs that silently discard inputs and return confident false results are worse than errors—they corrupt production data while appearing successful. Developers building multi-model routers must validate provider capability, not just key presence.
Implementation verdict
Replaces naive failover (check key exists) with capability-aware routing (ask provider if it handles this file type before sending). Requires per-provider feature detection methods and explicit format support matrices. Worth implementing immediately if you route across models with different input support.
Sources
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