Duct Tape DSLs: Model Routing, Structured Outputs, and Typed Tools (lowlevelmagic.io)

Figment’s midnight stream outage prompted a practical fork: open_router_enhanced, a Ruby gem built on Obie Fernandez’s OpenRouter that glues together model routing, structured outputs and typed tool-calling to keep “characters” (real-time LLM-driven personalities controlling lights, audio, etc.) robust in production. The repo provides a ModelSelector that queries OpenRouter’s registry to build ordered fallback chains (or pick models within a budget), auto-healing of malformed JSON by re-parsing responses with a designated healer model, and schema-backed response contracts that validate and retry until structured output conforms. It also adds a Tool.define DSL that emits OpenAI-style function schemas and validates parameters before your handler runs, plus cost-throttling logic using per-token price estimates to swap models when budget thresholds are hit. This matters because character work prioritizes operational reliability over single-response correctness: graceful degradation, consistent behavior across model churn, safe tool invocation, and real-time cost control. The gem tackles many pragmatic failure modes (API outages, hallucinated enums, exploding bills) but leaves room for future infrastructure—A/B testing, voice-consistency, character-drift detection, long-horizon narrative state, multi-character coordination, and engagement monitoring. The project is live on GitHub and RubyGems as a community-first “duct-tape” layer for production LLM deployments, inviting contributions to harden these emergent operational patterns.