How Shopify built an AI stack that doesn't care which models survive

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 new VentureBeat Beyond the Pilot podcast. “When a model comes and then it goes, or it could be as innocuous as an update, the proxy allows us to spray across the different providers,” Thawar says. Shopify buys tokens in bulk and all users connect to models through its proxy, Thawar says. This gives his team access to reporting and failover; when the…