I’m building a personal AI assistant as a learning/project thing. It has persistent memory, tasks, reminders, goals, events, and a classifier that turns normal messages into structured JSON before anything gets written to the database.
I recently switched the classifier to the Gemini API (currently Gemini 3.6 Flash). It actually performs pretty well so far — for example, it correctly extracted a goal, reminder, and event from one message and handled relative dates correctly.
The problem is reliability. During testing I’ve already hit multiple 503 UNAVAILABLE / high demand errors. I added exponential retry/backoff (2s → 4s → 8s), and on one test it failed twice before succeeding on the third attempt.
I’m still early enough in development that changing providers wouldn’t be a disaster.
For people who have built similar assistants/agents: would you stay with Gemini and design around temporary outages, or switch to another provider before the project gets more dependent on it?
I care more about structured-output reliability, availability, cost/free-tier limits, privacy, and API stability than having the absolute smartest model.
Also curious what you’d use instead and why — OpenAI, Anthropic, local models, or a multi-provider/fallback setup?
submitted by /u/L4TER_0N
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