Shopify's LLM proxy and distillation stack

Shopify's LLM proxy and distillation stack

Shopify built an LLM proxy that gives every engineer access to multiple AI providers — with automatic failover when any one of them goes down, changes, or disappears. When Claude Fable 5 shut down, Shopify's engineers didn't go into panic mode. The proxy shifted them to Claude Opus or GPT 5.5 automatically, without interrupting their workflows. “Fable looks amazing; we used it of course,” Farhan Thawar, Shopify’s head of engineering, says in a n…