LiteLLM Parity

clojure-llm-sdk is inspired by LiteLLM's broad provider coverage, but it is intentionally scoped as a Clojure library rather than a proxy server.

The goal is to provide the provider-abstraction pieces that applications need directly:

• canonical request and response shapes
• provider-specific wire-format adapters
• usage normalization
• cost and cache attribution
• model metadata lookup
• streaming normalization
• provider-specific replay state preservation

What This SDK Covers

Area	Coverage
Chat completions	OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Vertex, OpenRouter, Codex, DeepSeek, Kimi, Kimi Code, Mistral, Groq, Cerebras, Together, xAI, HuggingFace Router, Perplexity, Bedrock, Ollama, and aggregator aliases.
Embeddings	OpenAI, Cohere, Voyage, Mistral, Together, Jina, Ollama.
Moderation	OpenAI.
Rerank	Cohere, Voyage, Jina.
Image generation	OpenAI, Vertex Imagen, Bedrock image models.
Audio transcription	OpenAI Whisper, Groq Whisper.
Text-to-speech	OpenAI TTS, ElevenLabs.
Model metadata	Live provider catalogs, LiteLLM-derived snapshot, models.dev snapshot, and caller overrides.
Cost estimation	Registry-backed cost calculation with explicit unknowns.
Context caching	Provider-native cache markers and cache telemetry normalization.
Streaming	Canonical stream event taxonomy and final response reduction.
Fallbacks	Sequential caller-provided fallback list.

Design Choices Borrowed From LiteLLM

LiteLLM demonstrates that a useful provider abstraction needs more than a single OpenAI-compatible request builder. This SDK adopts the same broad lessons:

• Provider adapters should own provider wire-format quirks.
• Each modality should have a dedicated transformation path.
• OpenAI-compatible providers should share an implementation instead of duplicating adapters.
• URL construction should be configurable for deployment-routed providers such as Azure.
• Provider-specific cost math should be injectable.
• Unsupported provider parameters should be visible and handled before the provider returns a preventable error.

The Clojure implementation keeps these ideas as small library-level protocols and provider profiles.

What This SDK Does Not Cover

The following features belong in applications or infrastructure above the SDK:

• proxy servers and OpenAI-compatible gateways
• tenant-aware routing
• credential pools and key cooldowns
• spend budgets and billing ledgers
• secret managers
• observability vendor integrations
• Redis or semantic response caches
• vector stores and RAG frameworks
• MCP clients and agent tool runtimes
• prompt management systems
• guardrail policy engines
• fine-tuning, files, and batch job administration
• realtime WebSocket audio sessions

The SDK stops at provider request/response behavior. Applications remain responsible for product policy, persistence, routing, tenancy, and observability.

Provider Adapter Strategy

Adapters fall into three categories:

1. Native transports for providers with distinct APIs, such as Anthropic, Gemini, Cohere, Bedrock, Ollama, Perplexity, and Codex Responses.
2. OpenAI-compatible aliases for providers that accept Chat Completions shape with different base URLs, credentials, or small parameter quirks.
3. Per-modality transports for embeddings, moderation, rerank, images, transcription, and text-to-speech.

This keeps the public API stable while allowing individual provider behavior to evolve independently.