Fail your AI over to the next vendor when billing breaks, and know about it.

lifeskiff is an ordered list of AI providers with a retry hook for any loop. It tells a broken account (billing, key or quota) from a passing glitch, moves the same request to the next vendor, probes the first one back, and alerts you once an hour.

Billing-aware classifier

402, auth and day or month quota errors switch vendors; per-minute 429s, 5xx, timeouts and ordinary 400s do not. It reads the vendor's error wording, which a vendor may change.

Ordered list of providers

A request only moves down the list. A retry hook (begin, failed, succeeded, or run and arun) fits any loop.

Probe-back

While a vendor is down, one request per ten minutes tries it again, claimed under a lock so only one worker does it. The first success clears the incident.

Alerts once an hour

Per vendor and kind, through a function you supply, with a recovered alert. Webhook, background-thread and logger helpers are included; a webhook posts to the URL you give it.

Payload scrub helpers

scrub_messages and portable_tools make a history built for one vendor valid for another, so the switch does not fail on vendor-private tool-call signatures. You call them around your own model call.

Streamed tool-call reassembly

ToolCallAccumulator handles several calls that all report index 0 and keeps the vendor's signature.

Shared state

In memory, or in one JSON file shared by all workers on a machine. Any object with read() and update(fn) works as a store.

Offline demo and command line

lifeskiff demo replays an outage with fake vendors. classify, scrub, status, mark-down and clear are there for scripts.

lifeskiff 1.0.2: the Python package and the lifeskiff command, with an offline demo, a runnable tool-loop example and the full test suite, with 172 automated tests.

A commercial license. Use it and change it in your own projects and your clients' projects. Don't share or resell the source. Read the license.

Every update. New versions land in the same repository; git pull to get them.

Python 3.10 or newer. Python 3.10 or newer; no third-party runtime dependencies. lifeskiff calls no vendor itself, so you bring your own model client.