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ADR-002: Provider-agnostic AI interface

Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-02-26
Authors: Anders Hassis

Context

Section titled “Context”

Erode needs AI capabilities for dependency extraction, component selection, and drift analysis. Different teams prefer different AI providers (Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI) based on cost, availability, or organizational requirements.

Coupling the analysis pipeline directly to a single provider’s SDK would force all users onto that provider. Supporting multiple providers without an abstraction would duplicate prompt building, retry logic, JSON extraction, and response validation across each implementation.

Decision

Section titled “Decision”

Define an AIProvider interface with methods matching the pipeline stages: selectComponent, extractDependencies, analyzeDrift, and patchModel. Implement a BaseProvider abstract class that contains all shared logic (prompt building via PromptBuilder, retry with withRetry, JSON extraction, Zod validation). Concrete providers (GeminiProvider, AnthropicProvider, OpenAIProvider) only implement callModel(), the single method that makes the SDK-specific API call.

A ProviderFactory creates the correct provider based on the AI_PROVIDER configuration value.

Rationale

Section titled “Rationale”

The BaseProvider pattern minimizes duplication. Each new provider only needs to implement one method. All shared concerns (retries, validation, error wrapping) stay in one place.

The factory pattern keeps provider selection out of the pipeline code. The pipeline calls AIProvider methods without knowing which SDK runs underneath.

Consequences

Section titled “Consequences”

Positive

Section titled “Positive”
  • Adding a new AI provider requires implementing one method (callModel) plus a model constants file.
  • Prompt building, retry logic, and response validation are consistent across all providers.
  • Users switch providers with a single configuration change.

Negative

Section titled “Negative”
  • The callModel abstraction assumes all providers accept a text prompt and return text. Providers with fundamentally different interaction models (streaming, tool use) would need interface changes.
  • BaseProvider becomes a shared dependency. Changes to shared logic affect all providers simultaneously.
Section titled “Related commits”
  • 8691ba8 - chore(release): release 0.4.0 (#24)