AI Gateways Are Not I/O-Bound Proxies I Benchmarked 5 of Them to Prove It
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The wrong mental model Most engineers think of AI gateways as thin reverse proxies. The mental model is something like nginx with proxy_pass accept a request, forward it to OpenAI, stream the response back. I/O-bound. The runtime barely matters. This model is wrong. Here is what actually happens on every request through an AI gateway: Parse the JSON body Validate the API key, Check rate limits Resolve the routing rule Select an upstream provider Mutate headers Forward the reque