My LLM Provider Went Down Mid-Task. Twice. Here Is How I Fixed It.

Had Claude go down on me mid-task twice this month. Both times deep in a multi-file refactor. Just sat there waiting. After the second time I set up automatic failover. The Problem When your only LLM provider has issues, your entire workflow stops. Rate limits, outages, degraded quality during peak hours — these are not edge cases anymore. They happen weekly. And you usually find out at the worst possible moment. The Fix I route through multiple providers now. When Claude returns errors or rate limits, my setup auto-switches to DeepSeek or GPT-4o. The quality dips slightly for complex tasks but at least work continues. How Auto-Failover Works Request goes to primary provider (Claude Sonnet) If error (503, rate limit, timeout): circuit breaker activates Request re-routes to secondary provider (DeepSeek-V3) Circuit breaker tests primary again after 5 minutes When primary recovers, traffic shifts back This is the same pattern web services use for database failover. Applied to LLM provider