Everyone talks about picking the smartest AI but nobody talks about what happens after

What I have observed is that most conversations about AI tools focus mainly on one thing: Which model is the smartest. People usually pick the best one, hook it up, and be done. But that's not actually where the real pain is.

I think the real headache I have faced is that every AI company has built things their own way, so if you set your app up to work with one AI provider, and later either want to add or switch to a different one, you basically have to redo a bunch of the setup, since they don't talk to your app in the same way.

Even small things behave differently. How the AI's answer shows up on screen. What happens when something goes wrong and needs to re-try. None of this shows up when you're just testing things out. It shows up weeks later, once real people actually start using it, and something breaks in a way that's hard to trace back.

Curious if anyone else has hit this, added or switched to a provider and had something quietly break that you didn't see coming?