The challenge is that AI providers are incentivized to make leaving as painful as possible, which they achieve through deep integrations and proprietary features. You can control some of this through architectural decisions. Other parts are structural dependencies you should at least be aware of going in.
Swapping platforms will never be painless, but it’s less painful than being locked in when your vendor decides it’s time to recoup its losses, as every AI provider eventually will.
The part you control
The foundation for portability is the abstraction layer, an internal service your applications call instead of hitting Claude, GPT, or Gemini directly. It uses a request format defined by you, and translates that to whatever the vendor behind it expects. If you need to change vendors later, it’s closer to a configuration change than a code rewrite.
