A rewrite cuts LiteLLM to 2,900 lines, two dependencies

A developer rewrote LiteLLM's provider-routing core in about 2,900 lines with two runtime dependencies, openai and httpx. It went up on Hacker News September 11 under the description "litellm without the bloat."

What got cut matters more than what stayed. litelm drops LiteLLM's Router class, proxy server, response caching, cost tracking, token counting, image generation, and agent framework. Those aren't edge features, they're the core pitch of every AI gateway product on the market: usage visibility and a hosted layer between an app and its model providers.

The rewrite keeps 19 provider routes, message translation, streaming, tool calling, and embeddings. It carries 262 passing tests, 75 of them ported straight from LiteLLM's own suite, ships under MIT, and sits at 162 stars.

Porting 75 of LiteLLM's tests and passing them in a fraction of the code says the routing and translation logic was never the hard part. It shipped bundled with billing and observability tooling that got treated as the same problem, even though nothing in litelm's test suite depends on it.

That split is worth noticing if you're picking an LLM client. Provider routing is small and mechanical enough that a two-dependency fork can replicate it. Cost tracking, caching, and a hosted proxy are the pieces that didn't survive the rewrite, and they're the pieces a gateway subscription is actually selling.