Hey HN, this is Andy from Respan (https://www.respan.ai). We are building an open-source Rust AI gateway. It is a decoupled gateway, so everything is a plugin, including different providers, protocols (MCP, voice), modalities (images, videos), and gateway features (fallbacks, PII redaction, smart routing).Instead of packaging tons of providers and features into one gateway, Respan provides a small core and public interfaces that teams can use to assemble the AI infrastructure their application needs. That way, users can build their own features as additional plugins without having to change the gateway's core.Here’s a video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVv2ibXiTXMThere are countless LLM gateways and most of them solve a common problem: calling different providers from a single endpoint. However, adding new features can become prohibitively difficult. So developers can end up building another gateway to solve a specific problem.We've been building our gateway based on LiteLLM since 2024, and now it's providing services for thousands of orgs. Each org needs different API key settings, routes, and limits. To support that, we kept wrapping LiteLLM, adding more features to it, and at one stage, our wrapper code exceeded 100,000 lines.This January, a routine LiteLLM upgrade caused intermittent connection errors, and we had to roll back. We still haven't figured out the cause, but since then, we no longer upgrade LiteLLM directly and instead manually backport upstream fixes. These experiences made us realize that continuing to patch LiteLLM is not a sustainable long-term solution, and we had to redesign the gateway ourselves.While redesigning our gateway, we wanted to make it easier to add features without breaking existing ones. Inspired by Nginx, we think an AI gateway should have a really small core, only responsible for dispatching events.We believe that everything should be a plugin in our gateway, including providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini), protocols (chat, realtime voice, MCP), modalities (images, videos), and gateway features for reliability and security (smart routing, fallbacks, and PII redaction through example plugins). Beyond that, we want developers to be able to easily extend the gateway's capabilities by adding their own plugins, without touching the core. Adding a provider, even your own, is dead simple, because quirks are plugins too and there’s nothing magical about them. A provider is a short file, Mistral’s is 22 lines, and each quirk, like Groq putting token usage in its own field, gets its own test.Respan Gateway does more than let you call Claude or Gemini models from the OpenAI SDK. It handles tools, images, and reasoning protocols automatically: an application based on the OpenAI Realtime API can also use Gemini Live through the gateway, though not every feature translates. A sim