gateway

Without one, every team implements its own retries, its own key handling, its own logging policy, and nobody can answer what the company spends or what a model change would break.

A model provider is a single dependency with a shared failure domain across every customer they have. Treating it like a database you cannot fail over from is how a product goes down for four hours.

Every team standing up its own tool server produces a permission surface nobody can enumerate. The gateway exists so that connecting an agent to a system is a reviewed act rather than a config file in somebody's repository.

A mandatory gateway can centralize limits and filtering, while applications authorize business actions. Neither a prompt nor a PII classifier guarantees that sensitive data stays private.