Don't marry one model: keep your AI setup portable
Every few months a new model arrives that is cheaper, faster or simply better at your kind of work. If your whole setup lives inside one vendor's interface, that good news becomes a rebuild. It doesn't have to. The trick is to treat the model as a part you can unscrew — the knowledge, the wording and the customer channel all stay yours.
- Keep your prompts in files you own. A folder in your Drive with the agent's instructions beats prompts pasted into a vendor's chat box and forgotten.
- Keep the knowledge separate. Price list, FAQ, policies — plain text or Markdown, in your own storage. Any assistant can read them; none of them owns them.
- Route every AI call through one place. One setting, one key, one file. Then switching providers is a config change, not a project.
- Keep your ten-question test set. Before you swap, run the new model against the same questions. Same answers, cheaper bill? Swap. Worse answers? You found out in ten minutes.
- Own the door, not the brain. Your Telegram bot, your website chat, your inbox — those stay put. Only what's behind them changes.
My own client-intake bot runs on one provider, falls back to a second, and falls back to a scripted flow if both are down. Switching brains is one environment variable — and that's the whole point.