Openrouter SDK Patterns

Overview

This skill covers best practices for building OpenRouter client wrappers, including retry logic, error handling, response typing, and reusable patterns.

Prerequisites

• OpenRouter integration
• OpenAI SDK (Python or TypeScript)

Instructions

1. Create a typed client wrapper: Build a class that wraps the OpenAI SDK with OpenRouter-specific defaults (base URL, default headers, retry config)
2. Add automatic retries: Implement retry logic with exponential backoff for 429 and 5xx errors; the OpenAI SDK has built-in retry support via max_retries
3. Type your responses: Define TypeScript interfaces or Python dataclasses for your expected response shapes to catch errors at compile time
4. Implement request/response middleware: Add hooks for logging, cost tracking, and metrics collection that run on every request
5. Build reusable prompt templates: Create typed functions for common tasks (summarize, translate, classify) that encapsulate model selection and prompt engineering

Output

• A reusable OpenRouter client class with built-in retry, logging, and typing
• Prompt template functions for common AI tasks
• Middleware pipeline for cross-cutting concerns (logging, cost tracking)

Error Handling

See ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/errors.md for full error reference.

Examples

See ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/examples.md for runnable code samples.

Resources

• OpenRouter Documentation
• OpenRouter Models
• OpenRouter API Reference
• OpenRouter Status