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Litelm: LiteLLM Without the Bloat
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- khalic 20d agoI strongly recommend the authors rewrite the readme by hand. It’s kind of a snif test for how much care someone put into this project.
- devinpadron 20d agoAgree. The LLM'isms are offputting.
- VCFundedGenYer 20d agoThrowing my support for this. Do not use LLMs to write things humans should write.
- ravenstine 20d agoReally? I mean, yeah, it's probably written by an LLM, but it's hardly the worst that I've seen. Looks way more straight forward than the modern README featuring a ton of badges, emojis, confusing out-of-context screenshots, "trust me bro" installation instructions, vague elevator pitches, "used by netflix, nasa, disney, good morning america, alex jones, the church of scientology", and other verbiage to create the illusion that the author won't immediately get bored and abandon their glorified dissertation piece. They all scream "give me your github stars" whereas this one doesn't. But I still get what you mean when it comes to the particular 'isms.
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- rexpop 20d ago[flagged]
- khalic 20d ago1. Not a tangent, it’s related to the very first content visible on that link. 2. Not a dismissal, an advise from an expert 3. Not complaining, as stated, giving an advise about the optics of using clear LLM prose on the first paragraph
- Barbing 20d agoTangential annoyance?
- conorcleary 20d agoRadial annoyance declarations only!
- 0xbadcafebee 20d agoThis readme is better than most readmes. However they came to making it, it's clearly working
- bityard 20d agoI have the same complaint about oh-my-pi's readme. The tone is obnoxious. It's somehow jaded and matter-of-fact at the same time. Like it was written by that one guy at work who never misses a chance to brag about how clever he is.
- moron4hire 20d agoThere is a band called The Protomen who do rock operas about the Mega Man storyline. They have a very earnest, gritty sound. Every time I read a project README written by AI, I hear the voice over from the first track of the first album, Act 1: Hope Rides Alone (https://youtu.be/VZ8jyGVioxg?is=gsXlgwa4Ubx6LmKE https://youtu.be/VZ8jyGVioxg?is=gsXlgwa4Ubx6LmKE). "Twelve years Light worked and on a cold night in the year 200X, Protoman was born. A perfect man, an unbeatable machine, hell-bent on destroying every evil standing between man and freedom, built for one purpose, to destroy Wily's army of evil robots. Ready. Willing. Prepared to fight." For the Protomen it makes sense. But for a project README it's so absurdly melodramatic.
- xg15 20d agoOne "AI-ism" I noticed is that LLMs often just put sentences behind one another without using any connecting adverbs - and just leave it to the reader's imagination how the sentences are related to each other. E.g. in the readme: "LiteLLM routes LLM calls across providers and translates between message formats. That core is buried under 100k+ LOC of proxy servers, caching layers [etc...]". Those two sentences have opposite sentiment on LiteLLM, so a human author would at least put a "but" between them. In contrast, the LLM just strings them together. This reads "blunt" and "matter-of-fact" at first glance, but I wonder if it's really just an artifact of allocating less space for text generation and more for code in LLMs.
- jatins 19d agoomp is slopware through and through. And it shows, slow as hell to use
- Centigonal 20d agoThis is a cool project, and the idea of using LLMs to selectively extract features from open source projects is an interesting concept. The only thing I take issue with is the phrase "LiteLLM Without the Bloat." A lot of the features that have been removed (like cost tracking, streaming, caching) are... kind of the core value proposition of LiteLLM for many of their users.
- OutOfHere 20d agoLiteLLM doesn't quite live up to its name. With all those features, there is nothing "lite" about it. It is essential for a project to live up to its name. Imagine Sqlite adding heavy features from Postgresql, e.g. row-level security.
- sv123 20d agoBut imagine Sqlite not supporting joins or window functions... sure they are useful but look how many LOC it adds! Who is the arbiter of what Lite actually means?
- datadrivenangel 20d agoLiteLLM's problem isn't really features, it's how bloated all the features are, and specifically how AI maximalist and janky their dev practices are.
- freshtake 20d agoFirst off, cool project! It's always great to see derivatives that question the efficiency of the established product. I think the main thing the readme is missing is the core benefits. Reducing LOC and dependencies is cool, but it would be great to understand if this provides some additional benefits like lower latency or memory requirements.
- LeBit 20d agoHow does it compare to Bifrost?
- josephh 20d agoI'm always confused by LLM proxies that claim to support tool calling. Even for Bifrost that claims to be doing it, at least when I was checking it out, I found out that while it injects the list of MCP tools that's available on the proxy-side, it doesn't actually make the call on client's behalf, and clients get confused by it (response returns MCP call request whose tool doesn't exist on the client-side).
- robertclaus 20d agoLiteLLM is basically Bifrost in the Python ecosystem.
- gcgbarbosa 20d agoYeah, but bifrost seems tighter and claims to use way fewer resources
- yujonglee 20d agohey - litellm will migrate its core to Rust soon. please follow this issue if you're interested! https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/issues/31263 https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/issues/31263
- yujonglee 20d agoalso if you had resource issues with your production deployment, keen to hear more details
- testycool 20d agoI don't have specifics since it's been months, but LiteLLM on a hetzner server, deployed through Coolify was using 1-4 GB (cannot exactly, and dont know why either). Bifrost feels very light, though. Will try LiteLLM if it's in Rust. Would also appreciate a slicker aesthetic. I got used to Bifrost shadcn with 0 border radius.
- clickety_clack 20d agoOne of the 2 dependencies, httpx, isn't really maintained anymore. Pydantic picked it up as httpx2: https://pydantic.dev/docs/httpx2 https://pydantic.dev/docs/httpx2
- arjie 20d agoThis is a 30 minute project with a frontier LLM. I don’t see why anyone would use anyone else’s router. Techniques are valuable today. Libraries are not.
- gcgbarbosa 20d agoActually not. There are so many edge cases. Also these routers are only useful if they have a minimal layer of observability. Yes, LLMs can do a great job at writing semi-working MVP. Turning it into a usable project still requires a team. Yeah, maybe for your toy project you can use a LLM written tool. Also, I am not saying LiteLLM is good either.
- arjie 20d agoThere are always people who need an entire team to produce something like OP repo. Enterprise FizzBuzz is real after all.
- hopfenspergerj 20d agoI imagine many people code their own LLM client after getting fed up with the bad options out there. It’s very easy with ai coding tools. I’m biased but I think mine is coded to a higher standard than litelm. https://github.com/s-banach/langchaint https://github.com/s-banach/langchaint
- 9dev 20d agoFunny, everything you pruned away is the reason I’m deploying LiteLLM in our platform. Having a reliable way to track token spend per customer across different services is important to us, and LiteLLM handles this well
- dlojudice 20d agoIt would be great if there were a plugin/extension infrastructure. For example, to write the cache and costs however and whenever I see fit
- DrStartup 20d agomost software like this will be dematerialized, democratized, and demonetized - companies building in the infra band being increasingly disintermediated
- TZubiri 20d agoDrop the Lite, it's cleaner, just use the godamn LLM directly.
- asveikau 20d agoThis readme, when it talks about all the different AI endpoints it can use, reminds me of something. I'm not an AI bro, but I've dabbled. It's kind of remarkable that all the different providers speak the same "openai compatibile" https endpoints. In other realms of software development, real interoperability like that can be kind of rare. Even if people support conceptually the same API, everybody always puts their unique incompatible spin on it. In the dabbling that I've done, big incompatibilities seem rare.
- tway235 20d agotoken counting is useful though. There's also other ways to reduce size, ie a plugin API.
- isuckatcoding 20d agoAlso Strongly recommend renaming to avoid confusion
- nperez 20d agoImmediate first impression is that this tagline should go. If the project brings something valuable to the table it doesn't need to shit on other permissively licensed open source projects to make a case for itself
- hefu_hk 20d ago[flagged]
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- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 20d agoMake a docker image rootless please, thanks
- locitra 20d ago[flagged]
- mark_l_watson 19d agoI like the API, and since this is open source I will copy the design with attribution: I have been organically hacking little bits of LLM client code for most providers in Common Lisp for about 3 1/2 years and it is time to clean up all my old code. I probably need to do the same sort of refactoring for my search API wrappers. Thanks for the cool project.
- skrellm 19d agoROTFL, I had to laugh so hard! "Without the Bloat" vs. "litellm routes LLM calls across providers and translates between message formats. That core is buried under 100k+ LOC" Seriously anybody considering 100k+ LOC not a bloat? You made my day! Let's just say the author's and my definition of bloat is not the same. Full disclosure, I'm the guy who reimplemented etcher (over 400Mb) in a mere 300Kb, Capstone (over 1Mb) in only 66Kb and who compressed LPC charactersheets (over 700Mb) into 4Mb. That's my interpretation of "non-bloated".
- pama 19d agoYou misunderstood. This new project has 2,900 LOC. Maybe the spelling change is too subtle.
- skrellm 19d agoNo, you forgot about the dependencies (others said it to be 700Mb). And 2,900 LOC is still way too much for handling a remote API call, especially in a high level language such as Python where the biggest part of the task is delegated to separate modules. I wrote an entire https client from ground up in 117 LOC (and in a low level language, not Python): https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/skrellm/-/blob/main/src/https.c https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/skrellm/-/blob/main/src/https.c Again, this guy and me disagree on what "not a bloat" means.
- Terretta 18d ago> you forgot about the deps… (… 700Mb) On the contrary, the readme for this project, `litelm`, is contrasting with the bloat project, `litellm`. This project subty deboats an L. The bloat (or featuritis) project has the 700mb and 100k+ LOC, this de-bloat has 2k LOC and specifies its only two deps ones most people want as deps (although httpx should be swapped to its successor). So this response is off base, the 700Mb isn't forgotten, it's been dropped.
- santiagobasulto 19d agoCool project, I had to implement the same for my experimental AI Agent: https://github.com/quantized-ai/luca-py https://github.com/quantized-ai/luca-py LiteLLM and LangChain are AWFUL pieces of software and should be avoided at ALL costs. Btw, you should update httpx to httpx2, and I think it's not much effort to remove openai's SDK compatibility. I'd love to have a provider-agnostic LLM router (almost) dependency free (aside from httpx2).
- po_westnet26 19d agothe smaller surface is nice. i'd still keep auth and spend caps outside the proxy though, because once every app shares one key the blast radius gets ugly fast.
- devthinker-ai 17d ago[dead]